Tech giant Amazon recently issued a return-to-office mandate that required all employees to be in the office five days a week starting in 2025. The announcement was reported to have frustrated many Amazon employees and sparked debates over the future of remote work.
Are businesses ditching remote work? The answer is no, according to surveys on telework conducted by The Bureau of Labor Statistics (“BLS”), which have added to the Current Population Survey since October 2022. The survey asked workers whether they teleworked all hours (“WFH”), teleworked some hours (“Hybrid”), or did not telework or work at home for pay (“On-Site”). Figure 1 shows how working arrangements have evolved over the past two years.
Figure 1: Working Arrangement Amongst Full-Time Workers, Oct. 2022 - Aug. 2024
Perhaps the most striking pattern is the continued decline in the more traditional, on-site working arrangements. Over the past two years, five percent fewer full-time workers, or roughly six million, worked on site. Hybrid work, on the other hand, has been trending up. Since October 2022, five million more full-time workers have shifted to a hybrid working arrangement, echoing a prediction made by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom back in 2021.
Currently, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the U.S. economy and, by extension, the labor market. The tech sector, where nearly half of full-time workers either work from home or have hybrid arrangements, has reportedly laid off 124,000 employees in 2024. It remains to be seen whether Amazon is bucking against the trend or its new policy in fact signal businesses’ new desire to return to the old norm.
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