Labor trends ahead in 2022

Where are we going? What will the work of 2022 look like? Will we say goodbye to smart working? What new professions will emerge? And how many will disappear? It is not easy to answer these questions in such an uncertain phase. However, we can try to take a snapshot of what happened in the year we left behind, and try to reason about what future 2022 holds for the world of work.

• The office of the future (
  The Economist
  ).

Painful notes Globally, in the first few months of the pandemic, working hours decreased by 9 percent, unemployment increased, and low-wage, low-skilled workers were the losers. Some analysts fear that the pandemic will usher in a tougher era in which these people will struggle to find employment, or see their work done by machines (
Wired
).

• Four job trends to watch out for this year (
  Cnn
  ).
• It’s not the robots that fire us (
  Italian Tech
  ).

Why be optimistic However, there are good reasons, writes the
Economist
, not to be so pessimistic. By mid-2020, the OECD had calculated that in the event of a second wave of contagion, unemployment in its member states would be around 9 percent by the end of 2021. We know how it turned out, yet the unemployment data were better than expected. Three factors tell us that the world of work will continue to exceed expectations in 2022:

• The first is about working from home. Estimates suggest that people will spend five times as much time working outside the office as before the pandemic, increasing happiness and productivity (
  TechRepublic
  );
• then there is automation: many economists assume that the pandemic will usher in the rise of robots. It is certainly true that past epidemics have encouraged this process (after all, robots do not get sick), but so far the jobs that are supposed to be most vulnerable to automation are actually growing just as fast as others (
  The Economist
  );
• The third factor, finally, concerns politics. In fact, in the wake of the pandemic, policymakers and central banks have become more interested in fighting unemployment rather than pursuing goals such as reducing inflation-at least for now-or cutting government debt. We live in an age in which we spend a lot of money. In the United States, Fed Governor Jerome Powell has promised to maintain an accommodative monetary policy until employment has increased substantially (Bloomberg). In Europe, politicians are far less obsessed with austerity, and governments are working to spend the most impressive investment package the continent has seen since the Marshall Plan. In short, a little better, perhaps, we came out of it.