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COVID-19 has forced businesses and employees across the globe to rethink what it means to go to work.

As we return to some sort of new normal, how do we ensure that that return is equitable?

Stay tuned for a special branded episode of Global Translations, presented by Citi, January 27th.

Hey Louisa, welcome to 2021. We made it! Are you pumped? This is going to be so good.

I cannot believe it. I just cannot believe that 2020 is over.

If you could go back to the beginning of 2020, what would you tell yourself? What would you let go of? What would you do more of?

Oh my gosh, I would say just stock up on the toilet paper. Just buy a lot of toilet paper and get a freezer. And don't leave your favorite heels at the office because you don't know when you'll see them again.

I'm with you on the heels. I left all mine at the office too, unfortunately.

And I would definitely say to lock down the parental controls on all the computers because you don't want your kids playing video games in the middle of remote school, which is a thing. How about you?

I reckon I would have put more soundproofing in my apartment if I had done that renovation over again.

Uh-huh, good idea.

It's not soundproof enough even now. Zach is like, it's not soundproof enough even now. He just shouted out. Did you? But seriously, if we could do a redo, I would be looking at us spending those trillions of dollars that went into fiscal stimulus, having them spend it in a smarter way.

All right, well, we've been talking a lot on this podcast about the important resources that we need and how our access to them has been completely blown up by COVID. We've talked about vaccines and what goes into them and about the natural materials that we need for the green energy transition and the future of technology. But obviously another important piece of this puzzle is human resources, the people who are going to do the jobs. And we're at a moment where labor markets have been totally remade, both by remote work, but also by so many jobs disappearing and other jobs being put on hold indefinitely as industries transform. And so 2021 is going to be all about figuring out the jobs and the people and the human resources.

A hundred percent. Fewer band-aids, more skills. That would be my mantra. We're still left with a world reeling from the crises and events of 2020, especially the coronavirus and global economic downturn. A big part of our stark 2021 reality revolves around jobs and how there's a broadening disconnect between the people who need them, the skills needed to do them and how hard it is to get them. So in this last chapter of the season, for the next three episodes, we're focused on labor. The current state of work, what's changing and where it's going. From Politico, this is Global Translations. I'm Ryan Heath.

And I'm Louisa Savage.

There is this longstanding trend where we were talking mostly about technological change and what that was going to do to a specific set of tasks and a specific set of skills and what that meant for job disruption, but also job creation.

This is Sadia Zahidi.

And I think what's happened now with the pandemic is you've got a sort of double disruption going on. You're having sort of a broad-based change across the jobs market where certain sectors are fully on pause or declining and unlikely to return or wholly new sectors that are in very high demand and therefore creating a lot of additional jobs.

Now, if anyone has their finger on the global jobs outlook, it's Sadia. She's a managing director at the World Economic Forum, or WEF for short.

And my areas of responsibility, if you will, are the work we do around economic growth, revival and transformation and work and wages and job creation, education, skills and learning, and then equity, inclusion and social justice. So sort of new economy and society stuff.

The WEF recently launched its latest Future of Jobs report. Sadia says they found that the overall global jobs outlook was positive. They expect that over the next five years, there will be more technology-driven job creation than job losses. However...

At the same time, what's become very worrying is that the rate of job creation has significantly slowed down and the rate of job destruction has significantly sped up compared to two years ago when we did this exercise, which means that the window of opportunity for any kind of proactive action just became a whole lot smaller.

So we've got more jobs disappearing and fewer jobs replacing them. That's not good, Sadia. You've spoken on many previous occasions about how the pandemic can be an opportunity to transform the global workforce. So what's your latest thinking there?

Various...

Economies will recover. They'll recover at various speeds. But if there's one thing that policymakers have to really do is ensure that we simply don't go back to setting only economic growth as a target. It has to be the kind of growth that delivers jobs, that delivers broad-based prosperity, that is compatible with the planet, and that is built off of good institutions and governance.

Multiple stark economic realities have been revealed by the pandemic.

I think what this pandemic has made very clear is that some of our previous challenges that we all knew about, you know, whether that is the lack of social safety nets or whether that is the decline in wages or the hollowing out of the middle class, we can no longer sort of continue to expect our societies to function if we don't tackle these head-on. So there's an opportunity for a sort of social safety net reset that's going to be necessary.

And if I asked you to diagnose the sickest part of the global labour market, it could be a region, it could be a sector, what would it be? What's your prescription to heal that?

We definitely found that the sectors that were the most sort of stalled are consumer and retail, they are aviation, travel, tourism. Not surprising. These are sectors where basically most economies have come to a halt. Or it's a stop-start situation as we go into lockdowns, then come out of lockdowns, then maybe go back into lockdowns with a second wave, etc. So with those sectors, I think what we have to watch out for, it's not just about giving them a short-term life support, because they simply may not come back if the situation lasts for too much longer.

But this poses a high level of risk to the smaller competitors, the businesses that aren't corporate behemoths. Sadia says that even with short-term financial relief for those firms or their employees, they still might not make it through.

And so those would probably be the sectors where a sort of a collective reimagination is needed to start thinking, what are those jobs and investments of tomorrow? And maybe the second part of the answer is really around this. Across the board, you know, most governments are failing to think right now smartly about the markets of tomorrow, the jobs of tomorrow, and building in the incentives with this massive fiscal stimulus all around the world. This is the moment to also reserve some part of the support for investing in the future and not just managing the crisis in the short term.

In the 2020 rush to save whole industries from collapse and make sure that unemployed workers had a safety net, we were less good about investing in getting workers the skills that they need for the world of work that had just turned upside down. It's not a problem most workers can solve on their own. Later on in this chapter, we'll be getting into some examples of potential solutions.

A third element is we've known for quite some time that there is a skills mismatch and it's growing. And there needs to be a much bigger focus on re-skilling and up-skilling, either wholly focusing on re-skilling and re-deployment into a new job or a new sector, or up-skilling within the job you're in so you're able to actually sort of continue to thrive in that particular role. Those are, again, things that absolutely need to happen.

Re-skilling is training workers for new occupations. For example, training a restaurant manager for a supply chain management job at a big corporation. Upskilling, on the other hand, is more like an invigoration of a worker's existing skill set. It's more tailored for helping workers keep up with job changes. For example, helping a veteran IT specialist learn new data analysis skills to move into a better role at the same company. Sadia says that while re-skilling and up-skilling efforts have already started in many places, there needs to be more work than ever to use these initiatives for recovery.

So, yes, we've had all kinds of skills-related councils, but we're not in that world of a sort of a very job-full market. We actually need to start thinking very consciously and proactively about those jobs of tomorrow and think about what are the structures and mechanisms needed to move people, migrate people over from the jobs they're currently in or from unemployment into those new roles. Now, that's a very different approach to thinking about safety nets. It's not just handouts. It's not just providing income support. It's not just short-term furlough schemes. It's actually having that long-term vision to say, if this is where we need to be heading in the future, what is the path of moving from A to B to C so that people can actually land on their feet?

The big challenge will be in using this next year, not for more expensive band-aids, but for building the future.

The good news is it can be done online for those that are just digitally connected, for those that have those skills, for those that are able to reskill and upskill themselves online. And that can be done for, frankly... very large number of middle-income, middle-skilled jobs, as well as high-income, high-skilled jobs. Is it possible for lower-skilled workers, people who work in factories, in manual labor, in mines, for them to be reskilled? And I think there's a lot of emerging evidence that shows yes, but it requires those public sector structures that don't often exist. Now, there's been a tradition in the past of, you know, for example, job centers for people to be able to go to. But they have tended to focus on keeping people within their industries and perhaps helping expand their network if you don't have that network digitally that a lot of middle- and high-income jobs do. That's the kind of mindset that would have to shift, and there would need to be more proactive support in helping that person reskill and upskill themselves. It comes from a pretty fixed mindset about what human beings and human capability is all about, I think, if we, as you say, give up on people. Whereas it has become very clear in places that haven't given up on people, it should be absolutely possible to reskill and upskill. And it doesn't necessarily mean from coal miner to coder, right? There's a whole range of other things that one can move to. What we found already is that there is, for most jobs, I think it was something like for 85% of people, you could not only reskill fairly rapidly from a low-skilled manual job to a slightly more higher-skilled still manual job that also paid you better, right? So it is possible to do this in a way that doesn't lead to extremes, but still leads to improved livelihoods and a sense of pride and not necessarily a loss of identity.

The pandemic is reshaping work globally, as many people are forced to switch jobs and find new careers. But climate change and the green energy transition are also creating new jobs, the kinds of jobs that are just starting to come into existence, or that we might not even know about yet.

One of the things we found that is problematic is that we don't yet all have a common taxonomy or a common language around what those jobs of tomorrow are. You know, we can say green recovery, but then let's translate that into green jobs. And green jobs can go all the way from somebody who is repairing a bicycle to somebody who's installing solar panels to somebody who is a professional services or financial services analyst of carbon markets. So there's a whole spectrum of roles. So I think the good news is that there's a whole range of low, middle and high skill roles that exist within roughly speaking, green jobs. A focus on a green recovery provides a whole set of additional roles and future job opportunities. But so do some additional sectors like care, like education, like digital that we could be focusing on. I think the question mark is going to be, how do you do that at scale in more of the lower skilled workforce, or in places that still have a big digital divide and don't have, you know, good internet access in various developing and emerging market countries. And that is where the job creation potential of the education and learning sector comes in. So that's a vast number of jobs that can be supported and created and incentivized by governments in developing countries if they start thinking of education and learning as a new services sector that has to be developed. I guess we're also in a

competitive situation where more and more people, all of them are just going to have to retrain to keep their jobs. You know, they'll have to stay competitive in their current market. Have you got any data or insights into how well employers are taking on that challenge? Do they need more support, whether it's governments or some other entity to make sure that their employees can just tread water, basically?

So I think the answer is a bit mixed there, because we found that employers recognize, or at least two thirds of employers clearly see that there is a business case for investing in reskilling and upskilling their staff, whether that's done online or in person, that we don't know. But they do see a clear business case, and they expect the return on investment within one year. The difference with this crisis, though, is that so many of them are taking really short-term decisions about layoffs, and especially when they're not supported through furlough or income support schemes from governments. They're making really short-term decisions, and they're not necessarily realizing that it would be better to keep that worker, reskill and upskill them, and have that talent and history and knowledge within your organization. And you get that payoff a year later, rather than sort of shedding that role and possibly searching for rehiring somebody with possibly very similar skill sets a year later, two years later, or as the economy recovers. So there's a lot of fun.

certainty in the system. But generally, we found employers recognize the business case, they recognize the return on investment, but not all of them are following through on actually

applying that in their own workforce. Sadia Zahidi is Managing Director at the World Economic Forum.

Thanks, Sadia. Thanks for having me, Ryan. We'll be right back. With the COVID-19 vaccine rollout underway, many companies have begun to discuss how their

offices will return to normal. We make sure that as we slowly and carefully and in a data-driven way return to the office, we keep that individual humanity and empathy and understanding of circumstance so that that return is equitable and we don't inadvertently leave certain populations

further behind. I'm Heather Clancy. On a special branded episode of Global Translations presented by Citi, we discuss the future of work, how the pandemic accelerated new workplace trends, and why an equitable return to work is essential. Tune in January 27th wherever you listen to this

podcast. I mean, I think the way to characterize it is that we've half recovered from the catastrophic events of March and April. So the 22 million jobs that were lost in those months, about 11 million of them have returned and the other 11 million we're patiently waiting on.

Marianne Wanamaker is a professor specializing in workforce economics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She previously served on the White House Council of Economic Advisors.

One of the big trends that Marianne sees in the pandemic is employers looking for alternatives to hiring while they're waiting to bring their workers back safely.

And some of those alternatives are just using the employees that they do have to work harder. Another alternative, of course, is to purchase labor-saving technologies, some robot or some computer program that replaces the labor that they had. And the longer the pandemic rages, the more likely it is that employers choose that latter option. And so you really heard a lot of stories at the very beginning of the pandemic about companies looking around and saying, well, gosh, we've been waiting for months or years to think about this technology adoption, we might as well go ahead. And that's a sign that they anticipate that this is going to last for a long time and they won't be able to bring their workers back.

I'm interested to learn what else you see as major obstacles to job creation and job retention. You know, right now, you're someone who studies these issues every day. What do you see as further hurting our ability to bounce back and get back to a full employment situation?

One thing is that the hiring process itself is super challenging right now. So just wading through all of the applications, we have never had this many unemployed people simultaneously in this country, never. And so you think about the role of a hiring manager who posts a job and is presumably receiving many more applications than they otherwise would have. It's just a challenge to wade through them. For some jobs, not all, and I don't want to overstate this, but for some jobs, there also now is the sort of release of the geographic restriction. So whereas before I might have been advertising for an attorney in New York, now I'm really advertising for an attorney, but they can be anywhere in the country and maybe even anywhere in the world. And again, that sort of makes my application numbers explode. Then you add on top of that, the process of sort of vetting and interviewing in an all remote situation. And it's just a really big challenge. So part of the lag in the job market recovery is going to be about just getting people on hired, vetted, onboarded, and trained. And I expect that to be a huge challenge going forward.

This isn't the first mega crisis the world economy has seen. The Great Depression was just a century ago. We're still feeling the effects of the 2008 recession. So what are the absolutely essential lessons from past crises that could possibly help us today? There are a couple of things that past crises have

taught us that at least at the moment, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't accept those lessons. One of those things is just the timing that we should expect. So traditionally, a labor market recovery takes a full year following an output recovery. So if you think about, all right, sometime next year, this economy will go back to producing the amount of output that it was producing in Q4 of 2019. And when that happens, then the lesson of past recessions is that it will take us another 12 months to employ the same number of people we were employing in Q4 of 2019. And one way to think about that is that employers sort of run hot for a while. They wait until they know that there's really the demand for labor in their organization before they go back to the labor market and hire. The other lesson, Wanamaker says, I think we learned in 08-09 and that I think is still relevant is that

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like the construction industry. When in 08 and 09, we were slow to help state and local budgets recover, we experienced, many economists think, a much slower labor market recovery as a result.

Sadia Zahidi told us at the top of this show that we need to reskill to make up those jobs.

And Marianne Wanamaker agrees. So if this 12-month time lag is something we're just going to have to live with, do you think that the federal government should then be coming in and supporting reskilling and retraining, particularly for those people who don't have college degrees, the ones that are most likely to be at risk of longer-term unemployment? You know, in other words, should we make sure that we don't waste these 12 months and that we're giving these people the best chance possible for when employers are ready to come back and employ them, even if that does cost some money in the meantime?

Yeah, I mean, there are two ways of thinking about the government's role in reskilling. One is that the government is responsible for kind of juicing the finances of reskilling. And the other is that the government has some role in the reskilling process itself. I'm pretty favorable on the first and pretty unfavorable on the second one. So one thing we have learned in this pandemic is that it is impossible to predict what tomorrow's skill needs are. I can't tell you how many pages of sort of the economics literature has been spent thinking about the skills gap. What skills do Americans need that they not have? Well, whatever that was in December of 2019, it has now been turned upside down. And so the idea that the federal government can somehow step in and say, well, gosh, it looks like we're going to need a whole bunch of coders, so let's train people to code, I think is pretty silly. On the other hand, there are ways in which the government could spend money strategically and opportunistically to sort of grease the wheels of private market reskilling.

If the solution isn't to have the government lead reskilling efforts, then what is an alternative?

And so something that I've been thinking about a lot is, okay, what if the government paid private industries to train new workers? Now, why would the government do that? Well, they would do that because it would help get those workers off of public support more quickly. And there are lots of public benefits to having people employed. And so it's worth it to spend tax dollars on private industries, private businesses who are training new workers as they come in the door.

And so the idea with that is that if the voucher is with the employer, there's an incentive to make sure they're actually employing people rather than leaving it to the individual who might not spend it as effectively. Have I got that right?

That's right. The individual doesn't necessarily know what to spend it on. And presumably employers know the skill that they're trying to hire for, but can't find the labor market. And certainly you can think about employers, smaller employers banding together to train people, right? It doesn't have to be a gigantic business like IBM, who's very good at training their workers. So you wouldn't necessarily be putting small businesses at a disadvantage if you were creative about the way

that you spent the money. As it stands in early 2021, the US labor market is still pretty flat. Industries like leisure and hospitality are suffering greatly as they are in the rest of the world. But beyond specific industries and stats and layoff numbers, what could be coming America's way?

Once we get this virus under control, then what do we expect to be sick? And I expect that we'll see the same sickness that we saw in late 2019 and early 2020, which is the lower end of the skill spectrum in the US continues to struggle to make a living wage. And that is an ongoing issue.

Mary Ann says that the enhanced unemployment payments from the summer of 2020 could be a model for the future.

I think about that as sort of a trial balloon, a trial run of universal basic income, of the idea that like there's some subsistence level of income that all Americans are entitled to. And the pandemic made it really obvious that there were so many people who weren't reaching that level. But I think even after the pandemic fades, we're all going to remember that moment, right, where we said, wait, everybody deserves this amount of money to pay for housing and food and whatever else. And so I imagine that that conversation is going to be renewed once we've gotten the pandemic behind us.

So what is your worst case scenario for the jobs market in 2021?

I think the worst case scenario for me is not that we're going to have a bunch more layoffs. I actually don't think that's possible. I don't think that's going to happen because I don't think that people will tolerate it. Don't think small business owners will go along with this.

game where they close again. I just don't think it's possible. I think instead, the kind of worst case scenario here is that we don't draw a grand bargain. We don't trust Washington to kind of pay people to keep them afloat while they close their businesses again. We're not willing to do that. And so instead, what we do is we keep businesses open, and we sort of hobble along, and a lot of people die. And that is actually what I expect to happen. It's just a question of the severity of that. But we don't seem to have realized that there is a way out of this, which is that we close businesses, but we make everybody whole. And then how could you complain, right? I mean, yes, you made me shut down, but Washington immediately compensated me for that, paid my people, allowed me to sort of keep up to date on my lease payments. That's possible. There's not really a cap on how much Washington can spend at the moment, but there doesn't seem to be any political will to go down

that path. Professor, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Throughout this episode, we've been having conversations about the job market with the experts and decision makers. And in each of those conversations, recovery solutions always come back to the question of job training and reskilling.

The idea of reskilling workers has gained more attention over the last few years. Major corporations and even governments are investing a lot of money in giving workers options to learn skills for their

current jobs or for new ones. Giving workers and job seekers access to programs like these can aid our transitions to green energy and to a world where you need digital skills for nearly every job. Because in a rapidly changing global economy, millions of people want and need that step up.

For the first time in my life, I am proud of where I am and who I am and what I have accomplished. And I'm so proud to tell everybody what I do for a living.

In the next episode of Global Translations, we'll talk to some of those people and hear their stories.

Our producers are Annie Rees and Cara Tabor.

Our senior producer is Jenny Ament. And Irene Noguchi is the executive producer.

I'm Louisa Savage.

And I'm Ryan Heath.

Thanks to Sadia Zahidi and Marianne Wanamaker for talking with us at Politico. Global Translations is presented by Citi, a leading global bank.

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and listen to a special branded episode from Citi coming January 27. Thanks for listening and see you soon. liquor to the那i, Tina, our new video can מב quote,

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