Who is able to work remotely?

From CBS News
BY MEGAN CERULLO

​Black and Hispanic workers are more likely to work in lower-paid, consumer-facing service jobs that limit their ability to work remotely, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the non-profit Economic Policy Institute and the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor.

"The vast majority of the workforce can't work right now, and if I didn't look at this data I might get a skewed idea of what share of people can actually work at home," Shierholz said. "To think that everyone is at home doing their work and keeping their jobs is the wrong idea."

According to Shierholz, only 6% of service-sector workers said they could work from home, according to government labor data. Transportation and material-moving workers were least likely to be able to work from home, followed by Americans in production roles; services jobs; construction and extraction; and installation, maintenance and repair jobs.

From The New York Times

Income is one of the stronger predictors of health outcomes — and of how long we live,’’ Woolf said. “Lost wages and job layoffs are leaving many workers without health insurance and forcing many families to forego health care and medications to pay for food, housing, and other basic needs.

People of color and the poor, who have suffered for generations with higher death rates, will be hurt the most and probably helped the least.

They are the housekeepers in the closed hotels and the families without options when public transit closes. Low-income workers who manage to save the money for groceries and reach the store may find empty shelves, left behind by panic shoppers with the resources for hoarding.

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