Americans Are Being Encouraged to Work From Home During the Coronavirus Outbreak. For Millions, That’s Impossible – By Tara Law (TIME) / March 9 2020
Ever since the coronavirus began spreading in her home state of Washington, Azia Jenkins has spent hours cleaning her workplace: a 2017 Jeep Patriot. Jenkins, who escorts children for supervised visits on behalf of Child Protective Services, fears that her vehicle is becoming a petri dish, putting herself, the children she supervises, and her own two daughters at risk. Her new cleansing ritual, which she performs before and after dropping off any children, involves wiping down the compact SUV’s handles, seats, and steering wheel with Clorox wipes. She’s also trying to teach her children how important it is to wash their hands as much as they can.
Public health experts are recommending that companies encourage employees to work from home to prevent the potentially deadly coronavirus from spreading around offices, public transit and elsewhere. Many firms, like Apple, Microsoft and Google, are following that advice. But remote work isn’t an option for people like Jenkins, who, like millions of other Americans in fields like retail, dining and other industries, can’t simply log on to software like Outlook, Slack or Google Hangouts to do her job.
“Either I stay home, and I miss out on money, or I continue to work and I get sicker and sicker or I get other people sick,” says Jenkins, 26.
For all the promise of high-speed Internet and other innovations that can make it possible for us to work from anywhere, only about 29% of American employees actually did their jobs remotely as of 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those who work remotely tend to be both better-educated and wealthier. Among workers ages 25 and older, 47% of workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher worked from home sometimes, according to BLS data, compared to just 3% of workers with only a high school diploma. Of course, some highly educated workers, like medical professionals, also typically have to show up in person for work.
Alex Baptiste, policy counsel for the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families, says the remote work gap is just one way the coronavirus outbreak is underscoring inequalities inherent in the American economy. “On the one hand, you want people to have the best benefits that they possibly can, and when you see that kind of progress, we’re excited about it,” Baptiste says. “But it definitely is showing how wide the gap is between who have it and people who don’t.”
Continue to article: https://time.com/5797382/coronavirus-remote-work-home/
