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Unemployment rising in remote-friendly occupations (2024)


The recent rise in unemployment is steeper in occupations where remote work is more widespread. A continued rise could shift bargaining power towards employers who want workers to return to the office.

Predictions about remote work tend to be grounded in structural arguments about its impact on productivity, flexibility, supervision, mentoring, and organizational culture. In the emergence from the pandemic in 2022 and 2023, unemployment reached historic lows, giving workers bargaining power to resist calls to return to the office. Of course, for many occupations telework is rare or nonexistent, like food prep, building maintenance, construction, mining, and transportation – changes in the unemployment rate in these sectors probably won’t have any effect on the prevalence of remote work.

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