By Nicole Oro

January of 2020 would mark the beginning of an unsettling chain of events for people around the world. The corona virus would be issued as a public health emergency, and much more would begin to happen for the rest of the year such as countries all over the world going on lockdown, job insecurities, education changing as we know it and the health sector facing its biggest challenge yet. Covid-19 became the modern hallmark for catastrophe at the same time enabling us to have an introspective look at the things we have deemed as normal. We wish to explore how covid-19 has affected the work industry.

The Negatives
The job market has always been competitive and remains that way, but with the global pandemic of 2020 we have come to see a big shift for small businesses and large industries. With the lockdown came a large unemployment rate as companies prioritized the health of their workers and stopped operations, people lost their livelihoods and some of the companies are yet to recover from their losses. The negatives must outweigh the positive from the looks of things, the International Labor Organization monitor states that “by far most of the global employment loss in 2020 translated into rising inactivity rather than unemployment, leading to an additional 81 million people shifting to inactivity alongside 33 million unemployed. Consequently, the global labor force participation rate has dropped by 2.2 percentage points.” This is telling us people cannot find jobs and a whole lot of them may not be actively seeking for employment and this could be because of various reasons but the major one on everyone’s’ mind is their safety. Before the pandemic jobs that required close proximity were thriving very well but with the pandemic.

we could see a big shift from those jobs. Industries such as the food, entertainment and hospitality have been most impacted by the pandemic and must try to recover their losses. Their patronage is no longer the same because people would prefer a no-contact approach because of covid-19. Jobs in customer sales and the service industries are also badly hit and this pandemic has gone to show that in future there maybe low growth in such areas. The shift for low-income workers to other low-income jobs was very much possible before the pandemic but now those jobs are not there, and such workers would have to think of going into better industries and to do that they have to improve their skills. For example, someone who worked in a supermarket could easily find work as a cashier in a cinema but now those two goes are almost going extinct.

The positives
With covid-19 came a strong need for remote work. Before now some companies entertained the idea of remote work but due to the lockdown industries that were not completely essential had to work from home. Remote work is now being embraced by some organizations and it is even being encouraged as some small businesses are going fully remote. Although going remote would have some pitfalls but it comes with such great benefits that cannot be overlooked and if there is anything we have learnt from the pandemic is that change is constant. The eCommerce industry is one that thrived because of the lockdown, there were lot of people who discovered the eCommerce sites for the first time and with their ease agreed that they would continue to use them. Manufacturing and transportation companies also saw a peak in their respective industries.

The digitization of services that were previously done manually have now taken off such as online banking and the use of streaming services and jobs that have to do with social media are advancing rapidly. Technology is on the rise even more; we see the need for robots that can do the work faster and more efficiently and reduce human contact. Technology, and healthcare are essential areas that would continue to succeed in the near future. There is a huge difference from what life used to be precovid-19 and right now. To fully understand the situation, and survive, constant update is necessary. New policies would have to be put in place to protect low-income workers and people who are likely to be discriminated against. Organizations and industries would help the situation by being more flexible and rework their blueprints so their workplaces can flourish.