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An end to the urban housing crisis
If there’s any industry whose future seems seriously in doubt, it has to be manufacturers of traditional office furniture. Not the stuff that might allow you to cram a stand-up desk into the spare bedroom or fit a fold-down workstation in the hall, but the guys that make the acres of metal filing cabinets and miles of cube walls that define many of America’s before-time work environments. The trend toward allowing more workers to do their jobs from home was already there before COVID-19 made landfall in the U.S., but it really hasn’t moved along as quickly, or as broadly, as many people predicted a decade earlier. The pandemic has taken care of that. Now even those workers who swore they preferred to be in the office, and those positions that were regarded as strictly face-to-face, are discovering that sweat pants really are pretty comfy and Zoom wasn’t a bad investment for a Senator trading on insider information.
The end result of this is likely to be that hundreds of thousands of workers—at a minimum—are never going to return to the office space they were occupying before this thing began, and that’s not even accounting for any period of business downturn. That means that cities and building owners are going to find themselves with a sudden surplus of office space. This was already true in many areas because while cities like San Francisco have kept their office towers mostly full and the cost of square footage extremely high, many others already had block after block of space sitting empty. In both cases, the demand for housing at a reasonable price would seem to be the best way to put to use space that’s unlikely to ever be filled again by ranks of desks and middle managers. That time was simply … before. We don’t, and won’t, do things that way anymore.
This isn’t always a super-quick fix. Office buildings aren’t generally plumbed or wired for being converted into condos and apartments. Also, in the wake of COVID-19, there is likely to be a greater concern about how people get in and out of their homes, and handle supplies, without necessarily having to share a tiny elevator with other residents and touch a hundred surfaces touched by everyone else.
All of which means that an investment into conversion of office space to housing would be a great use of funds early in the recovery period. In fact, planning how this might happen would be a good use of funds now.
A flattening of management
While we’re sending all those people to work from home, one thing that can probably go along with the cubicles and ugly green metal desks, are a lot of the middle managers prowling between those desks. In my own last role as a manager, I had a group of 30-something people, about half of whom were offshore. Even with half the team safely tucked away out of sight, an inordinate amount of time was still caught up in hours of required daily meetings and an assumption that the only way to “manage” people was to be frequently trooping them into a room to force them to listen to what other people were doing. The vast majority of that time was purely pointless. Yes, there might be an “ah-ha!” moment from someone realizing that a trick they’d invented would be helpful for someone else’s task, but that was an exceedingly rare occurrence. Instead, most meetings just consist of making people sit around for two hours while waiting to give the five-minute report on their progress.
In the post-COVID world, there are not just likely to be fewer physical meetings, but fewer meetings overall. And since it’s clear that employees can be trusted to work on their own without managerial eyes boring into their backs, the number of management tiers could definitely receive some trimming.
A flattening of pay
The lockdown period has demonstrated that many workers genuinely can work on their own, with little supervision and a greater flexibility in their schedules. That’s all good. It’s also demonstrated that some workers must be physically present, must do their jobs even in hazardous situations, and have to coordinate closely with colleagues to keep everyone else fed, healthy, and Zooming.
Whether those workers are shoving boxes around a warehouse, bagging groceries in a store, or doing anything in a hospital, the one word that describes them all is essential. If COVID-19 has done anything positive, let’s hope that it’s given us a much better idea of who really keeps the world rolling. It’s not anyone with CEO on their title, it’s not anyone punditing on TV, it’s not anyone engaged in entertainment or sports (as much as we may miss the later).
Many of the people engaged in jobs that we previously thought of as somehow “lesser” roles turn out to be the ones that all of us needed when times got tough. That’s a good reason to improve their pay, healthcare, benefits, and the overall respect accorded these positions. A post COVID world seems like a very good place to press for real restrictions on the difference in pay between the line workers and top management, now that we understand which of those is genuinely vital.
A more progressive America
Though the people waving the stars and bars around Michigan (and … really guys?) may not be aware of it, everything that has happened since the first case of COVID-19 has been a terrific argument for every item on the progressive agenda. We’ve seen that it is a huge problem to have people depend on their jobs for healthcare in the midst of a crisis that causes millions to lose those jobs. In fact, we’ve seen how quickly the whole economy can go from okay to hoo boy in a way that’s also a good argument that people’s livelihoods should also not be dependent on their jobs.
Should the attempts to reopen some states fail to generate immediate economic boosts, it’s easy to see how the next round of bills coming through Congress could involve a kind of national emergency income. Which could be the forerunner of a genuine universal basic income. One of the things that happen in emergencies is that they reveal the weakness of the existing system, and COVID-19 has demonstrated just how fragile is the glass house in which we’ve all been living.
Universal healthcare should just be a G. D. given
One really nice thing — the Green New Deal already has a lot of what’s needed to move into a genuinely post-COVID, post-Trump rethink of how America operates. And while the economic aspects of that proposal are building a new, fairer, more stable system for the future, it might even keep some of the smog-free skies that have been one of the few upsides to the last few weeks.
This barely scratches the surface, and “what happens next” is always a great jumping off spot for speculation. So … speculate away in the comments below. But since we’re all living pretty deep in dystopia-ville at the moment, let’s keep those ideas closer to “nation rediscovers economic policies of M. L. King” than “Donald Trump invents Hunger Games.”
We’ll do another of these in a few weeks, so keep on thinking ahead, generating ideas, and planning for a better future.
