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CNN
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As the economy slows, are employers starting to regain the upper hand in negotiations with employees and job seekers? Pay is always an issue, of course, but in the wake of the pandemic, so too is how much time employers want people to work on site versus how much they are willing to let employees work remotely.
Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that only 27.5% of private-sector businesses reported that their employees worked from home or another remote location some or all of the time between August 1, 2022 and September 30, 2022.
In other words, 72.5% of private-sector organizations — up from 60% in the July-to-September 2021 period — said they did not have employees working remotely.
That percentage struck work-from-home researchers and observers as surprisingly high, given what other studies and surveys have found. (More on those in a minute.)
Private sector businesses employ a majority of US workers and, according to the Pew Research Center, 61% of workers do not have jobs that can be done remotely. But it’s worth noting that the BLS findings did not measure teleworking arrangements at federal, state and local government employers, at nonprofit organizations or among the self-employed.
The BLS survey also interpreted respondents’ answers as referring to a company’s formal telework policies, not whether some employees informally work remotely on occasion, such as responding to work emails from home.
“To the extent that ‘work from home’ would include an individual who checks their email after hours, we purposefully did not want to capture that type of informal work activity in the estimates as this would likely be included in the ‘rarely or never’ category,” a BLS spokesperson said in an email to CNN.
Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom said he finds it hard to infer much from the BLS’s 72.5% finding, because he contends respondents must have misread the survey’s very first question, which said, “Do any employees at this location currently telework in any amount?” In his view, “any amount” includes answering work emails or taking a work call from home.
Semantic concerns aside, however, the confusion and surprise over the BLS finding is a reminder that there is still no standard or easy way to measure…
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