From the Wall Street Journal about a week ago:
Tech-industry representatives are coming to Capitol Hill this week to warn that the remote-work trend will lead to more offshoring of software developer and other technology jobs unless the U.S. admits more high-skilled immigrants.
Remote jobs in tech jumped by more than 420% between January 2020 and last month, growth that was intensified by the pandemic, according to a jobs data review by Tecna, a trade group for regional tech councils. In February, more than 22% of all tech jobs were listed as remote, compared with 4.4% in January 2020.
Well, they would say that wouldn’t they?
But lurking beneath the opening two paragraphs of the story is something bigger. Working from home is not infrequently described as a revolution in the way that we work, an assertion of the individual, no longer sentenced to the drudge (and the expense) of his or her daily commute, now better positioned to live a more balanced life, and all the rest of it.
But revolutions have a way of devouring their own children, and (even though the real meaning of the phrase is rather different from what I am about to describe) something akin to that unpleasant fate is likely to feature in the future of a good number of those now WFH, especially those who spend more time during the work week at home rather than in the office. Even if we ignore the importance of seeing and be seen in many office environments, at least the more competitive ones, it will be no great surprise if employers, one way or another, try to grab a share of the savings that the employee is making by avoiding the daily commute. Best guess: WFH will, in one way or another, translate into wages lower than they might otherwise have been. Looking further out, it’s not hard to predict the rapid growth of a piece-work economy, where people WFH, effectively providing “office” space at their own expense, are paid only by what some algorithm has calculated they have produced.
And as for those potential tech workers abroad, well, once a company has discovered that those workers can do their work from home, there will (assuming the wage differential is great enough) rarely be much incentive to bring them over to the U.S. What’s more, it won’t take long before those same companies decide that the American tech worker WFH in say, Nashville, can be replaced by a worker WFH overseas. There will be no incentive (or, because of the nature of WFH, institutional ties) not to replace him or her with someone working in a country where prevailing wages are far lower.
I doubt if the current labor shortage will last for very long.