Continuing with the theme of tele-working, what often gets lost in the debate is the fact that not all workers can perform their jobs remotely, including from home. (Read an earlier piece: “Tele-working: a mixed bag?” published December 1, 2020). There are manual, managerial and service-sector jobs that require presence on-site or at-office, so that employees can perform the needed tasks using specialized machinery, equipment, terminals, software, etc. But there is another category where employees cannot work from home simply because they don’t have reliable broadband.
During the pandemic, it was observed across many countries that non-essential workers whose jobs couldn’t be performed remotely were more prone to lose their livelihoods when shutdowns and restrictions came into force. And Internet access plays a key role in determining whether some jobs can be done reliably from home. A recent working paper by the World Bank – titled “Who on Earth Can Work from Home?” – has attempted to understand the such constraints to tele-working by evaluating data from 107 countries.
The paper argues that both the prevalence of jobs that can be done from home and the incidence of Internet access are positively correlated with income per capita. In other words, developing countries like Pakistan likely have lower prevalence of home-based jobs because of lower level of economic development as well as lower Internet penetration.
The paper estimates that about a third of jobs in high-income countries can be done from home – in developing countries, tele-working is estimated to be possible for only about 4 percent of jobs. This huge disparity in tele-working incidence is, in part, due to higher share of services-sector jobs (which are more transferable to a remote setting) in developed economies and higher share of agricultural and industrial sector jobs (which cannot be performed at home) in the developing economies. And in part, the wide difference is attributable to low access and patchy quality of residential Internet in low-income countries.
The inequality in home-based work option and its consequences on labor market vulnerabilities isn’t merely a cross-country phenomenon. The paper suggests that even within a low-income country, well-connected regions (metros) will fare better and lagging regions (rural) will do worse in shielding labor market from vulnerabilities should lockdown-like situation arise again.
Similarly, jobs that require lower educational attainment, work that pays comparatively less less or employment with temporary contractual arrangements are less likely to be performed from home. Such workers are potentially more exposed to job losses when a pandemic-like natural disaster strikes again. The “bulk of labor market pain will be shouldered by workers in developing countries given the very limited feasibility of working from home and their limited recourse to social safety nets,” authors conclude.
Coronavirus has exposed existing inequalities and magnified their impact. As Pakistan’s federal government is engaged in firefighting amid a health crisis and economic uncertainty, one doesn't expect proverbial policymaker to pay attention to finer aspects of income inequality or digital disparities across the country, especially in the context of tele-working or remote learning or tele-health. Be that as it may, the pandemic has been a wake-up call to expand the country’s broadband infrastructure, for broadband has become a basic need for many.
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