The Covid-19 pandemic has opened a lot of new ideas for many companies to save their expenditures and therefore increase their wealth. One of these companies is Facebook who have already implemented in making their employees work remotely in order to reduce the spread of the virus and still carry on business as usual. Facebook realized that employees do not even need to come to offices for their normal business to work. This has caused Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive to let employees permanently work from home which in turn would mean that there would be no need for offices. This means that Facebook would not need to spend any more of its wealth towards building offices, hence increasing their wealth by a substantial amount. Mark also states that "remote work is going to be a growing trend" and also expects more than 48,000 of its employees to permanently work from home within a decade. Allowing remote work will allow Facebook to broaden its recruitment, retain valuable employees, reduce the climate impact caused by commutes and even expand the diversity of its workforce. This means that labor would increase causing capital to remain fixed or even decreased if Facebook decides to sell its office buildings to other companies. I truly believe that doing this would allow Facebook to help increase GDP as more work would be done with lesser resources primarily because the company is mainly based on software-engineers rather than hardware-engineers. The only catch to this would be that employees may not be able to keep their big Silicon Valley salaries in more affordable parts of the country.
Conger, K. (2020, May 21). Facebook Starts Planning for Permanent Remote Workers. Retrieved September 04, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/technology/facebook-remote-work-coronavirus.html
Many companies are reexamining how they operate because of the coronavirus in terms of where and how they work. REI recently built a new headquarters in Bellevue, Washington that spans 8 acres. Employees were supposed to move into the new campus this summer, instead, now they are selling the unused building and will be using multiple satellite campuses. This is because they too are embracing long term use of remote work and the benefits that come with it, such as reduced carbon footprint. They also noted that this will also allow them to attract and retain a more diverse workforce. I think it will be interesting to see the long term impacts of these choices from if carbon footprint is reduced, how employees like the change, and how it impacts GDP overtime.
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ReplyDeleteThis is a great point to bring up as it relates to many companies today during this pandemic. If you think back to even recently, the majority of businesses were actually very resistant to let their workers work remotely. Businesses are saving a lot of money by closing down their office spaces. Nationwide had even made the decision to sell their office spaces and make their employees work from home when they realized it was possible. The remote change will definitely allow the company to reach more people and bring diversity into the company. This will help employees save money because they don’t have to commute anymore which that money can be spent elsewhere. It will be interesting to see what more companies choose to do in the future and how it will affect GDP.
While talking about large corporations such as Facebook, remote working could be extremely financially beneficial for the company as well as for the workers. For example, in normal times without having to worry about a pandemic, large company meetings would involve workers traveling to attend these meetings, with everything paid for by the company. These days, those very meetings are being held on zoom from the comfort of everyone's home. Similarly, remote working would reduce the company's bills such as office space electricity etc. It will be interesting to see wether or not these large corporations will use these savings to invest in themselves, thereby providing more employment opportunities, along with economic growth. Only time will tell.
ReplyDeleteWhile its true that many companies like Facebook have decided to permanently make a lot of their employees work from home, I still believe that this will not be true for all companies. I personally just don't find working from home healthy for the worker.
ReplyDeleteAgreed but health will not directly affect GDP in any way. While it's true that if a person is working from home, he or she will spend more money towards their comforts and that might affect consumption rates to go higher which in turn increases GDP but at the same time, that is something which is variable and depends on each person and there is no quantifiable way of determining whether those consumptions or usage of services will take place or not.
DeleteFacebook's embrace of remote work will likely have severe affects on its least visible employees: content moderators. In 2019, Casey Newton, a journalist, investigated a Facebook contractor, Cognizant. He found that many workers suffered severe psychological consequences as a result of their work, which involves examining content posted to Facebook that may violate Facebook's guidelines. In short, they spend their working days viewing extreme violence, hate speech, and conspiracies. And they endure all of this without the relaxed office setting or high wages of other Facebook employees. (Technically, as contractors, they are not Facebook employees at all).
ReplyDeleteIf the content moderation firms Facebook hires embrace remote work, workers will lose even the community that eases the burden of such an appalling task. Further, if wages are adjusted for cost of living, content moderators will lose out even more.
Link to the article by Casey Newton: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona