Bloomberg Businessweek January 24, 2022 pp60 |LAST THING|with Bloomberg Opinion””Work From Home Is Here to Stay” by Justin Fox
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Summary by 2244
With the global COVID pandemic we’ve experienced some seismic changes. An obvious change is the number of us working from home (WFH). By the end of 2021 WFH accounted for “42.4% of U.S. workdays” down from 60% in May 2020 but up from only 5% before the pandemic.
Guesses are that WFH will settle out at about 30% to 40%. Data just now during Omicron reinforces high numbers of WFH as January office occupancy was at 27.9% “of the pre-pandemic norm in 10 cities.”
One survey, by the Census Bureau had “low response rates during the pandemic” and is a little out of sorts with the higher estimates. This study is reporting that only “15 % of employed Americans said they worked from home in 2020, up from 5.7% in 2019. Regardless, that's nearly a three-fold change.
A Bureau of Labor Statistics survey in 2017 reported that “51.9% of those with bachelor’s degree or higher [said they] could work from home, while only 11.1% of those with a high school degree or less could.” It is believed that WFH percentages are higher for those working “white-collar positions.”