Posted Jan 22, 2018, 7:20 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
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Cities Are Killing The Future Of Work (And The American Dream)
01.18.18 - POV
Read More: https://www.fastcompany.com/40517126...american-dream
Quote:
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For too many cities, being an engine of fast-paced, high-skilled job growth has also meant higher rents, longer commutes, less savings, and fewer homeowners. If we’re going to build a future of work that’s secure, innovative, and equitable, we’re going to need to buck one of the fastest-growing global trends: the urbanization of work.
- Sure, more people are working from home these days than ever before, but the growth of remote work has been slower than expected. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of workers who performed some of their work from home rose only five percentage points in the 12 years between 2003 and 2015 (from 19% to 24%). A major reason is the clustering of high-tech industries in urban areas, with mini Silicon Valleys appearing all over North America, from the Vancouver-Seattle region to the Boston-Providence corridor.
- This summer, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg told workers in his posh 14,000-square-foot San Francisco office to go home and not come back. He wasn’t firing everybody. Instead, the CEO of the popular publishing platform was inviting his employees to do their work wherever they wanted, and promising he’d help them do it. Mullenweg has completely reorganized his 550-person, $1-billion company around working remotely. Employees now get stipends to set up home offices. When they have meetings, they do it in online chatrooms. And when work does really require some face time, WordPress pays the costs for them to meet up.
- Earlier this year, Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster told his tech company’s employees, many of whom were struggling to make ends meet in the San Francisco metro area, that he’d pay them up to $10,000 to move somewhere else. “It can be a real challenge to turn the Bay Area into a lifelong home rather than a short stop somewhere in our twenties and thirties,” Foster, who’s originally from central Missouri, explained to his workers in a blog post last March. “The housing crunch and high cost of living simply price out many families and, despite loving the area, the realities are many of us need to look elsewhere to create the life we want for our families.”
- The freedom to work from anywhere is also one major factor cited by the growing number of freelancers. With more than 57 million Americans having freelanced this year, 45% say that being able to work where they want allows them to live in a less expensive area than a traditional job, according to my company Upwork’s latest Freelancing in America report. And finally, we have the technology to do what previous rounds of innovation haven’t: The proliferation of coworking spaces, faster and more widely available broadband, the growing popularity of video chat and collaboration platforms, and the promise of virtual and augmented reality are all ways to reinvent work outside of the cities that threaten to stifle it.
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