The Way We Work Isn’t Working

The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t only disrupted virtually every aspect of life, it’s also created an unprecedented opportunity to profoundly transform the way we work, how work shapes our lives, and whether we have time for the things that matter most to us. The next revolution at work is about making time for care.

In 2022, the Better Life Lab is focusing much of its attention and effort on ensuring that the way work changes is for the good — that work will be fair, decent, and equitable for all workers and that it will be “big enough” to sustain human survival and allow us to thrive. That the transformation will not just focus on equity for elite-knowledge workers increasingly able to work from anywhere, but will also include the workers we’ve called essential during the pandemic, yet whose low pay, lack of benefits, and precarious and unstable schedules signify that while the work may be essential, we treat the workers themselves as disposable. And we will be working to ensure that these changes for good work will stick. For good.

Through our toolkits, practical webinars, interventions, a narrative-driven podcast featuring the voices of diverse workers, and a convening of multiple stakeholders and roadmap to the future, the Lab is exploring one central question: How do we create the systems in a new economy, in a new normal, that center on human and worker health and well-being, with time for care, connection, and even leisure?

We’re also pushing against the common narrative that changing work culture is an individual responsibility — that somehow lunchtime yoga, or a mindfulness app courtesy of HR, while certainly helpful, is enough. Or that just working a little harder at a low-wage job, where women and Black and Brown people are overrepresented, will somehow create the social mobility necessary for a more equal society.

Workers in virtually every sector have been suffering often intense work stress with very real and severe health consequences since long before the COVID-19 pandemic. And the dire warnings about how automation and technology are radically changing the way we work often miss the real question: the challenge is not so much that robots will destroy jobs (they will), the question is whether we can rise to the challenge and create the kinds of jobs and systems that can lead to equitable human flourishing. In sum, the pandemic has made one thing abundantly clear: Work doesn’t work — for anyone, really. As the historian Patrick Wyman has said, “Crises like these reveal what is already broken or in the process of breaking.”

As we near the two-year mark of the pandemic, the crisis has lasted long enough that there is no going back to the way things were before. To all the CEOs who have demanded, often with little notice, and when no child care was available, that workers return to worksites in order to prove their worth and willingness to hustle, Dr. John Howard, head of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has this to say: “The idea that we’re going to go back to work like we did in 2018 or 2019 is a myth. Flexibility is here to stay.”

This is a period of tremendous potential. We could move beyond our current overwork culture that ties knowledge workers to long hours of work and traps low-wage workers in long days of cobbling together different jobs or gigs to make ends meet and any “free time” is taken up with worry or the often convoluted process of trying to obtain public benefits to support life. But this is also a period of real peril. What if only women and caregivers take advantage of flexible work policies and all the men go back to a work site? The possibility then is of being “mommy-tracked to the billionth degree.” That, too, would serve only to replicate the current power structures that keep primarily white men in leadership and key decision-making roles in virtually every industry and every sector of the economy, and reinforce the outdated cultural norm that women are or should be primary caregivers. We can’t continue to focus, as the media has for decades, on job creation without examining that many of the jobs, primarily in the service sector, that have replaced good blue collar jobs lost in the 1970s are truly awful jobs. Not that the work itself is awful; the job is awful and not “big enough” to support a human life, much less a family.

For the last 40 years, we’ve seen a hollowing out of middle-class work that provided social mobility and stability, and an increasingly bifurcated workforce, often divided by race, class, immigration status, and education. We’re in a time of change. Leaders who once resisted work-from-home were either forced to adopt it or have come to embrace it as productivity has risen, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances for many parents and caregivers. We’re in the age of the Great Reassessment as across industries workers are voluntarily quitting at rates never seen before, even as millions of jobs remain unfilled.

Now is the time for all of us — policymakers, business leaders and managers, advocates, and workers — to come together and be intentional and thoughtful as we create a new vision for the future. Now is the time for all of us to rethink work, to make time and space for care, and design the systems that can harness the power of our diverse common genius.

Let’s not miss this moment.

Follow The Thread! Subscribe to The Thread monthly newsletter to get the latest in policy, equity, and culture in your inbox the first Tuesday of each month.