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Job safety in the Covid-19 crisis

“I'm three weeks in at my new job, and it’s like I'm trying to get back on my feet, and I have so much things that ... I have to catch up on, that I feel like: ‘When am I going to get a piece of air?’ Because it’s like I'm suffocating in bills and debt.... So, yeah, since corona, I can say it literally has been hell.”
— Nursing assistant interviewed by the American Voices Project

The American Voices Project is a nationwide study of how people are doing during these difficult times. It’s a first-of-its-kind study that relies on in-depth immersive interviews delivered to representative samples across the United States. We’ve talked to people about their health, emotional well-being, relationships, jobs, politics, and much more.

The pandemic class structure is increasingly built around a divide between face-to-face and remote work. Based on interviews with workers on both sides of this divide, this report explores whether this change in the structure of work is leading to new types of inter-worker relations and conflict.

Key findings:
  • The pandemic has created a new “risk divide” between (a) face-to-face workers who bear disproportionate health risks (exposure to COVID-19) and economic risks (exposure to layoffs), and (b) remote workers who are better protected from those risks.
     
  • Because Black and Hispanic workers are more likely to be employed in face-to-face jobs (due to systemic racism and other institutional forces), they are exposed to a double burden of heightened health and economic risk. This employment-based channel of unequal risk-sharing is one way in which the current crisis has exacerbated long-standing racial and ethnic inequalities.
     
  • The emergence of a heightened risk divide between remote and face-to-face workers might also be expected to intensify inter-worker conflict. Contrary to this expectation, we find that very few face-to-face workers are expressing resentment, with the dominant sentiment instead being a stoic fortitude (“inward gaze”), an appreciation that others are also suffering (“downward gaze”), and a recognition that “we’re in this together” (“outward gaze”).

READ THE REPORT

The “Monitoring the Crisis” series is cosponsored by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The American Voices Project gratefully acknowledges support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University; the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and San Francisco; the Ford Foundation; The James Irvine Foundation; the JPB Foundation; the National Science Foundation; the Pritzker Family Foundation; and the Russell Sage Foundation. The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality is a program of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences.

The views expressed here are the authors’ and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Federal Reserve System, Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, or the organizations that supported this research. Any remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility.


Copyright © 2021 stanfordcpi, All rights reserved.


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