Value of certain jobs exposed by Covid-19 pandemic

Consider Rowan Atkinson’s character’s line from the eponymous Bean movie: “Hello, I’m Dr Bean. Apparently. And my job is to sit and look at paintings.”

Across the world and in economies of all sizes, people who look at paintings and who do other pointless jobs will need to find another way of earning an income.

Covid-19 has brought into sharp relief the need to invest in job skills which can withstand the vagaries of the global economy, including an almost total and unexpected business shutdown.

“All jobs are in trouble,” East London-based Global Business Solutions CEO Jonathan Goldberg says of the current dip in work opportunities.

Goldberg says that, regardless of what happens in an economy, some jobs will always be important, but there are and will continue to be “big losers” in many job sectors.

As the rapid spread of the coronavirus forced lockdowns in most countries around the globe, economies have been devastated. Jobs have been lost which may never be recovered or, if they do return, they will be reconfigured to use less human resources and more intelligent engineering (IE).

Forced to maintain social distancing, to work from home or to rely on electronic communication, some workers have found there is no point to the jobs they hold.

Some of those jobs were meaningless long before the pandemic, for the individuals doing them and for the societies purportedly benefiting from them, as London School of Economic anthropologist David Graeber has written.

He identified managerial, clerical, sales and “ancillary” service workers in financial services, telemarketing, public relations, corporate law, universities and health administration, who found very quickly that the impact of being unable to do their job during the lockdown had little real impact on the lives of others.

Given the challenges of dealing with the pandemic, administration jobs may return to popularity in private and state-owned health care. But Graeber’s point is well made.

According to Graeber, those with jobs “making, moving, fixing and maintaining things” are reasonably safe under most circumstances.

Nurses, doctors, fruit pickers, fishers, food producers, teachers, carers, workers in energy production, mechanics, transport workers, builders, refuse collectors, are among the essential workers whose significance to society has become clearer as the pandemic has lived on.

In East London, African Horizons Recruitment director Ruarke Kerr adds all agricultural jobs to the list of work worth aspiring towards, along with jobs in computer programming and engineering, civil and electrical engineering.

Nobody approached for this article was prepared to comment on jobs whose value has shrunk as a result of the pandemic, with Ruarke saying: “I believe all jobs are good for society.”

However, Goldberg said those job sectors which had not pivoted through the pandemic by using, for example, information technology, would be decimated.

“The biggest losers are education — education is changed forever, it’s in big trouble,” he said, but added, “it’s been coming for a long time”.

He said the onset of technology meant that jobs in every sector were morphing into different forms of work.

“There’s a threat for those who don’t move into the digital age. The technology is becoming easier and easier. There is not a job which potentially is not threated by digitalisation. A lot of workers will be displaced.”

Using his own profession, law, as an example, he said he foresaw a world where eventually, a machine would adjudicate a dispute between parties.

“Most of your legal advice you can get online already. I see a world where, as a lawyer, you will make your case before a machine and you will get a decision out of it.

“It doesn’t mean a magistrate, an arbitrator or a lawyer is at risk, but the job will change; it may mean helping the parties to put their directives into the machine.”

Commenting on health care, he said it did not make sense for someone to waste their time waiting in a doctor’s rooms to see a professional, when someone could do a diagnosis online, send a script directly to a pharmacist and the medication could be collected or delivered.

“Of course, eyeballing you and having an interview with you is much better but the time lost in coming to your office can be better spent.”

But Goldberg said the new world of work on digital platforms did not mean more free time for workers.

“One thing the pandemic has caused is the blurring of lines between when you work and when you take time off.

“A lot of workers will be displaced, but if you’re good, there won’t be more time off. For people in demand, I don’t see them working a four-day work week.”