Working from home and the explosion of enduring divides: income, employment and safety risks

Abstract

Why are there so many non-teleworkable occupations? Is teleworking only a matter of ICT usage or does it also reflect the division of labour and the underlying hierarchical layers inside organizations? What does it happen to those workers not able to telework in terms of socio-economic risks, and how does the gender dimension interact with risk stratification? Hereby, we intend to shed light on these questions using a detailed integrated dataset at individual and occupational level (Indagine Campionaria delle Professioni, Indagine delle Forze di Lavoro and Inail archive) which provides information on different nature of risks (income, employment and safety). Our results entail that, first, class attributes, intended as execution of tasks, degrees of autonomy in doing the job, layers of the occupational categories, strongly influence the chance of working from home; second, those individuals who are not able to perform their work remotely are more exposed to transition to unemployment, to earn low wages, and to safety and health risks; third, being woman and employed with a temporary contract significantly amplify risk stratification.

Assessing the Economic Impact of Lockdowns in Italy: A Computational Input–Output Approach

“…Tele-workability is assessed through the same procedure applied in Cetrulo et al (2020a) who extend the exercise by Dingel and Neiman (2020) and adapt it to the European case. First, we retrieve information on tasks and activities performed in workplaces from the ICP-INAPP (Indagine Campionaria delle Professioni [Sample Survey of Professions]) dataset, which contains data from interviews with 16,000 Italian workers ensuring statistical representativeness of sectoral, occupational and geographical heterogeneity.…”

“…In order for an occupation to be classified as non-tele-workable, most of the respondents involved in that occupation must either indicate (i) that they spend a large fraction of their working time in external environments, or (ii) that they frequently use equipment, machinery and tools, or (iii) that they need continuous physical contact with other people, or any combination of (i), (ii) and (iii). More details about the procedure can be found in Cetrulo et al (2020a). After classifying occupational categories at the 4-digit level, these are aggregated at the 1-digit level according to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) and linked to the ISTAT 2016 Labor Force Survey to gather information about the number of workers across occupations and sectors.…”

Relationship between financial distress and mistreatment of workers regarding the COVID-19 prevention measures: A 1-year prospective cohort study

“… 39 Second, under the recommendation for telecommuting, the perceived vulnerability of specific occupations (e.g., the non‐feasibility of teleworking for manual labor workers) was revealed. 40 These workers are mostly on low incomes, and this study has highlighted that they feel subjected to unfair treatment. Financially distressed workers suffer from a double burden: poverty, and being in a socially vulnerable position that leaves them open to unfair treatment at their companies.…”

Vanishing social classes? Facts and figures of the Italian labour market

“…Almost thirty years of such policies brought about a country marked by deep stratification processes, wherein social and economic risks, such as wage losses, are largely concentrated among young female blue-collars, in disadvantaged areas. Such stratification reverberates from the economic to the social dimension, with cumulation of income, occupational and safety risks that are fully on the shoulder of the very same most vulnerable categories (Cetrulo et al 2020b(Cetrulo et al , 2022.…”

“…Nonetheless, the analysis via social classes, mainly framed in terms of occupational categories, is still crucial to understand the undergoing transformations of society (Wright 1998;Grusky and Weeden 2001;Atkinson 2007). Least but not last, social classes and occupational categories have been shown to be particularly relevant in analyzing the COVID-19 pandemic phase, especially in terms of access to telework (Cetrulo et al 2022) and, more in general, in studying educational opportunities, healthcare access, and intergenerational transmission of status (Albertini 2013). Furthermore, the interaction between micro-level occupational structures and macro-level class schemes has been recently adopted as interpretative lens in examining the anatomy of Italian occupations (Cetrulo et al 2020a).…”