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THE WORKING REVOLUTION

ARI BLAFF OPINION Freelance writer based in Toronto. His work has appeared in City Journal, National Review, Quillette and Tablet.

In recent decades, globalization has created a kind of mobility inequality, in which those who are more freely able to leave home for work can access more opportunities – but COVID-19 levelled the playing field

I’ve always struggled with leaving home. From heading off to summer camp as a child to trying to expand my horizons by travelling abroad in recent years, it’s been tough to shake off the homesickness and the temptation to call it quits and return early. For an introvert like me, home is the place of ultimate comfort – contentment with familiar faces, spaces and things. And that’s left me particularly illsuited for our increasingly mobile world.

We’ve been heading down a more global path for decades. As humanity progressively opened up after the Cold War, work and schooling were transformed. Expanding corporate footprints overseas, international students flocking across borders, and increasing urbanization are core facets of our new globalized age.

But while the accelerated liberalization of recent decades has increasingly outsourced industrial jobs in the developed world, it has rewarded the educated and upwardly mobile, creating a division among people that became more explicit in the wake of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. British journalist David Goodhart described this split as between “Somewheres” and “Anywheres,” each of whom held competing visions of the future: The latter’s “portable identities” benefited them amid the cultural and economic openness in the West, while by comparison, Somewheres are less privileged – “rooted,” oftentimes resentful and “left behind.”

The key difference here is geographic mobility. Protected by credentialled moats and networks, Anywheres have unparalleled access to the best opportunities across the globe. That’s why hubs such as Silicon Valley’s tech industry, Hollywood cinema and Manhattan journalism are magnets for meritocrats and aspiring immigrants. These job clusters, and the individual travel that fosters them, highlight the importance of movement in shaping economic success today. The decades-long decline of the rural economy and the massive population growth of cities speak to the reality that to be competitive today, one needs to be either geographically fortunate or geographically mobile.

Unfortunately, I find myself as an Anywhere trapped in a Somewhere’s body. Armed with a graduate degree from an elite university, I should be one of the fortunate beneficiaries of the meritocracy. However, my abiding reluctance to leave home disqualifies all that. Opportunities are passing me by while I stay here, tethered to home.

When I was in graduate school and contemplating a PhD and further academic life, the necessity of travelling to get into the best schools and pursue top jobs felt unfathomable. The likelihood of having to move to smaller U.S. towns for several years to get my foot in the door – often a typical career path for North American academics – was simply not something I could realistically contemplate.

Over the years, I’ve declined a university exchange program in Washington and even left an internship in Jerusalem early. I usually wouldn’t have bothered looking for jobs overseas, even if they seemed like a good fit.

But COVID-19 upended all this – now even the Anywheres have had to stay home. Although only about 4 per cent of Canadians worked mostly remotely in 2016, Statistics Canada found about one-third of Canadians were doing so by the beginning of 2021. Earlier studies estimating only a quarter of work forces would remain remote in 2021 now appear quaint, as do fusty misconceptions over the efficiency of employees working from home.

That’s changed the game for Somewheres like myself – I’ve been able to land a U.S.-based internship without having to physically go south of the border, partly thanks to feeling more able to

apply for openings I never would have before but now can because of the pandemic’s push toward remote work.

It isn’t just employees like me welcoming our new ways of working and living, either – many companies actually encouraged the exodus. Eyeing an opportunity to cut down on expensive real estate and overhead, leading tech firms such as Salesforce, Zillow, Slack, Twitter, Dropbox and Spotify all announced transition plans toward accommodating a permanently remote work force. Likewise, major companies such as Google, Intuit and Ford have adopted a “hybrid model,” maintaining a mix of both physical and remote work.

The decline of physical offices – and, as a result, the need to live in a particular hub – could not have come at a better time for geographically stagnant societies. The United States and Canada have both experienced decades of declining internal migration – citizens moving to other parts of the country – which has historically accentuated national inequalities. The offspring of Somewheres often become Anywheres, leaving sluggish heartlands for vibrant cities and deepening the problems faced by cratering rural economies.

So after so many years in which Anywheres were able to reap the benefits of how the world was evolving, Somewheres are finally beginning to make a comeback. Many professionals once tethered to key urban centres are decamping to smaller towns that offer more space, access to nature and other key draws for a more balanced lifestyle.

In Canada, more than 50,000 urbanites have left Toronto and 25,000 from Montreal between July, 2019, and July, 2020. Consequently, housing prices are surging faster in suburbs than cities themselves. This trend explains why Ontario municipalities such as Oshawa, Brock, Georgina and Scugog have experienced a nearly 50-per-cent annual jump in median property prices in recent months – a trend also seen to varying degrees in similar suburban areas across the country.

As always, such developments reflect and have consequences on class and educational lines. Anywheres “enjoy the kind of freedom and flexibility that used to be available only to successful novelists, artists and inventors – the ability to work when and where they want to,” academic Richard Florida and economist Adam Ozimek wrote in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

The brunt of front-line work, from retail to health care, has however been borne by lower-income workers lacking cushier alternatives. Advanced economies with a higher concentration of knowledge workers are, as a result, more likely to enjoy the benefits of such remote-work tailwinds than developing countries. The greater demand for housing in small communities away from the typical hubs has also sparked affordability crises for those who were living there before the pandemic.

Education has experienced a remote revolution of its own, with students now logging on to Zoom classes the world over. The shift away from the unshakeable belief in the need for physical attendance hasn’t been smooth sailing, but the world has kept on spinning. Elite universities across North America are now moving toward hybrid models to accommodate both domestic and foreign students, so undergrads in France, rural Canada or China can attend Ivy League schools online and get the same diploma without needing to leave their local community.

Despite the fanfare greeting the reopening of cities and mass vaccination campaigns, the future of work as we know it has been radically redefined. Even if life does return to normal – which seems premature to predict, with the Delta variant wreaking havoc – work as we once knew it may never come back. Commuting five days a week, confined to overpriced cities in undersized condos, could be a thing of the past. Employees and companies, as well as students and universities, have signalled their willingness to at least try bringing the world to their homes, rather than the other way around.

And that is tremendous news for those of us who have long been Somewheres. Once unattainable jobs are now within reach; the prohibitively expensive real estate markets in cities are now circumventable.

Possibilities I’d once written off long ago – such as applying to American publications or job postings for positions far from home – now feel like more of a reality, especially after my recent internship experience, which was fully remote.

The rise of “Anywhere Jobs” may have finally given Somewheres such as myself an even playing field – one that we don’t even need to leave home for.

The offspring of Somewheres often become Anywheres, leaving sluggish heartlands for vibrant cities and deepening the problems faced by cratering rural economies.

OPINION

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2021-10-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

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