Remote Work Sticks for All Kinds of Jobs

livemint.com:

Workers in unexpected jobs are clocking more time from home than before the pandemic hit. It isn’t just white-collar workers logging in from bedrooms instead of boardrooms. Lower-income, less-educated and service-industry workers spent more time working from home, on average, last year than before the pandemic struck.

The broad-based gains suggest that while much of American life has reverted to prepandemic norms, remote work persists and is subtly reshaping many professions. Workers overall spent an average of 5 hours and 25 minutes a day working from home in 2022. That is about two hours more than in 2019, the year before Covid-19 sent millions of workers scrambling to set up home offices, and down just 12 minutes from 2021, according to the Labor Department’s American Time Use Survey.

Those figures reflect the average amount of time all employed Americans—including remote, hybrid and in-person workers—spent working from home. Work done at home can include one minute checking a company email or a 12-hour shift. It strictly includes work done at home and excludes assignments done at a place such as a coffee shop.

One reason remote work remains more prevalent than before Covid-19 first upended job routines is workers still have a lot of leverage in a labor market that remains historically tight. Employers cling to staff they fought to hire during the pandemic rebound. About 8.4% of job postings on Indeed.com advertised remote or hybrid work at the end of May, up threefold from the same period in 2019.