Oliver Bateman Does the WorkVerified account

The term “essential workers” implies the existence of non-essential workers, which basically means jobs with cushy (expensive) benefits that the bosses have now figured out how to offshore without much difficulty.

I don’t know if this is correct. Society is working at barebones right now. Offshoring labour and destroying benefits is a forever goal and effort of capitalists. Besides, many jobs which cannot be offshored or automated aren’t well compensated in any sense.

Jobs that cannot be easily offshored or automated are what we're calling "essential" now. The costs of offshoring any kind of remote, distributed work are now quantified, which means that everything else is going to be on the table. Physical proximity was protecting some roles.

If it were that easy to go remote and fleece workers it wouldve happened w/o a pandemic. Many currently remote positions are working at reduced productivity rn. There are material advantages to in-place workers. Technology may overcome these barriers in the future though.

There was a lack of knowledge or a skepticism towards remote work - now companies have already been forced to bear the cost of running those experiments. Plenty of large companies are now announcing "permanent work from home" policies. The inertia is gone now.

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking but i think that there are more institutional/technological barriers to offshoring than inertia. Lots of companies start out being remote but move to physical locations. However, this would fit the trend towards proletarianization of the PMC

Yeah, I'd like to hope so too! Even if those barriers are real, I suspect there will be plenty of short-term profitability concerns that would make it attractive to replace expensive workers with workers who are 30% less productive but 50% cheaper.