Discover new insights on worsening job quality during the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020 Great Jobs Report, a research partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network and Lumina Foundation.
In addition to upending social interactions, the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected work in the United States and forced millions of people into unemployment. Conventional labor market indicators document some of these changes but miss how the pandemic has affected the quality of work and played out differently for low-income workers and those working in low-quality jobs at the onset of the crisis.
How COVID-19 Affected the Quality of Work addresses these issues using the 2020 Great Jobs Survey, which builds on the 2019 study to measure worker satisfaction across 11 important dimensions of work and provide the first comprehensive measure of U.S. job quality beyond income and benefits.
Key findings:
- Workers’ job quality before the pandemic strongly predicts job quality changes during the pandemic.
- COVID-19-related job and income losses have skewed heavily toward Hispanic and Black workers, as well as those with lower education and income levels.
- Access to remote work has opened new gaps in job quality.