spanish people love to tell you who they are and when they come from and i am no exception, one woman's journey seeking her heritage. i'm covering you insights into christine spots of the most of them all region. it's a story that seems to have been her brush from history in search of my roots on al jazeera ah al jazeera. when ever you oh, i am serial virginia in doha, the top stories anal 0 this hour. it's been 3 years since the world health organization declared the corona virus outbreak a pandemic. nearly 7000000 people across the globe lost their lives to coven 19 since the 1st case was reported in the chinese city of y. malcolm web is in kenya's

capital nairobi, and he says that despite lower death rates in africa than elsewhere, the continents economy still hasn't recovered. scientists had predicted it would be devastating throughout the rest of the continent because of the crowd in cities and the lack of public health care. but that didn't happen. testing rates were low, but the recorded fatalities were low and there was no overwhelming evidence of a lot of uncounted deaths. and while vos some were spent on researching cove, it, most of that money was targeted in richer country than the low fatalities in africa . still haven't been fully explained, but what was devastating for much of the continent was the impact of international travel restrictions which brought tourism and trade to a standstill made it even harder. people from this continent to visit europe in america because of those travel restrictions and the local locked downs. and curfews were also stifling for trade and for the economy and california financial

regulators have shut down silicon valley bank is the largest failure of a u. s. bank since 2008, the firm failed to raise fresh capital and then suspended, trading afterwards shares plummeted. there are recent developments that concern a few banks that i'm monitoring very carefully. and when banks experience financial losses, it is, it should be a matter of concern. iran and saudi arabia have agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations and reopen embassies. it comes after 7 years of heightened tension and confrontation at china helped broker that deal. at least 3 people have been killed and 14 injured in a blast. enough can a stand northern bulk province. the explosion took place at a shia cultural center which is supported by iran. many journalists have been

gathering there to celebrate national journalists day earlier on thursday. the provincial governor was killed in a suicide attack and his office she misses president case i ed says he plans to restore diplomatic relations with syria. teenager broke off at times with syria and protest of what it called its repression of political opponents. as a result, the syrian ambassador situation was expelled in 2012. this was when former president months of more suki was still in office lay. so in may, there is no justification for the non existence of its missing investor in the syrian arab republic, or the ambassador of the syrian, our republic, here and to news. yet, the matter of the regime in syria is an issue of concern to the syrians alone. we are dealing with the syrian states and the choices of the syrian capital. we have absolutely nothing to do with their choices. the italian coast guard has launched multiple rescue operations to save around $1300.00 migrants. they're packed on to several boats off the country, southern coastline. more than 3000 migrants have reached italy by boat since

wednesday. that's more than double the number for the entire month of march. last year. and rescue teams have saved nearly 50 migrants found stranded in a boat off the coast of spain, canary islands. the group included 3 pregnant women and 6 children. at least 6 people have died after heavy rains and flooding in northern peru. psych lonia who has left the trail of destruction. hundreds of families and now homeless is this like lone hit land earlier this week through has issued landslide warnings in almost 600 districts. and in the united states, 2 people died on friday in floods. their evacuation orders and severe weather alerts will remain in place until sunday. heavy rain across the west coast resulted in flood waters that surrounded home in california. indonesia murat, the volcano, his erupted volcano is located in the young carthage region. it has been spewing out hot ash,

up to 70 kilometers. mirror neuropathy is one of the major most active volcanoes. it was already on the country, 2nd highest alert level. right, those are a headlines analysis here. the news continues right here after the bottom line. ah, hi, and the plan is i have some questions. has the pandemic radically shifted the relationship between employees and their companies? and what's the future of work? let's get to the bottom line. ah, it's hard to describe the panic, the group, the planet at this time, 3 years ago. coffee 19 was still a mysterious virus. people were dying from it all around the world. no one knew how to deal with it other than staying 6 feet away from people watching their hands

frequently. i guess just hoping for the best government shut down their airports and schools and told people to stay isolated indoors by the end of march 2020. the world's biggest companies were totally shut down from ford to disney. as life pick back up, people started to have quote, pandemic epiphanies was their job worth it? would they rather care for their parents or their children? would they rather do odd jobs or work from home? so what should we expect now, as more and more workers are being asked to head back to the office, who is more bargaining power in the post pandemic world workers, or their employers. and how are big corporations adapting to the new environment? today we're talking with liz hoffman, author of the just released book crash, landing the inside story of how the world's biggest company survived and economy on the brain for years live covered markets and corporate deal making it the wall street journal. and now she's the business and finance editor at some of the work. we're in full disclosure. i also work. and julia poll our chief economist at the

job search site, zip recruiter, dot com, and nick bunker economic research director for north america at the job search firm site. indeed dot com, who got a lot of talent here to talk about some tough times. you know, we're basically, you know, 3 years still in the cove. it but it changed society and live one of the biggest take ways of how companies and how this nation found the way to adapt to this terrible pandemic. yeah, i think for me, steve, it's good to see you. you know, one, i think just high level take away. that's important. that's a little backward looking though, which is the economy was just much more fragile than we had appreciated going in the pandemic. if you remember in early 2020, you have employment at unemployment at a 50 year low. you have the stock market setting record highs and there was a veneer of strength and resilience that was just very quickly proven to be just that pretty surface level. you know, looking ahead in terms of the lessons that you know, that i think and hope that companies take out of this one is you never have as much

cashes you think? i worry that lesson is actually not being learned. i'm not internalized in part because the federal government stepped in, i think rightly but, and effectively build out the entire economy. but i think going forward, as we see sort of hiccups and sort of dark dr. clouds gathering over the economy. i think companies are going to wish that they had they were a little more liquid than, than they have that they have been so far. a lot of the focus you have is, you know, i really enjoyed reading about that. then secretary of treasury, stephen minutia in the middle of all this, some decisions the made just interested in who you think the heroes of that moment were and who the villains were. i think stephen minutiae and deserves a lot of credit here. he and j pow and both of them. by the way. i have an accidental bureaucrats, right. i think you're making a list of who will be treasury secretary, you know, before donald trump with the left it, i don't think stephen manage and would have been anywhere on it. he was a hollywood producer and been off wall street for for years. j. how, you know,

ended up at the fed, under the obama administration, as a compromise candidate as a political compromise. really, neither of them were supposed to be in those jobs. they were in those departments were incredibly understaffed, working largely remotely, as, as almost everybody else was. i think just are a lot of credit, certainly some fair criticism. there's always a tradeoff between getting money out quickly and getting it exactly where it needs to go. and i think that that's just, that's part of the deal. i think the decision was made rightly here to just get it out. the fed did, and the treasury did you know what about 6 or 8 weeks what it took them 9 months to do in 2008. what they never did in 192-9980 7 past crises. and so the lesson here is, is just send money out. obviously we're living now with the consequences of what i think was a ticket that was clearly open too wide for too long. oh, thank you. well, julia, polack, euro and economist,

and you've seen the data that have come out of this time. you also see what's going on today. how was this social contract around work change? well, we saw the biggest reorganization to the way work is done in our lifetime. jobs that were predominately on in person and offices were shifted to being remote. that huge share, a workers ended up doing the majority of their work from home and companies learned something from that experiment. the technology was there for decades before we could have done this. there were many reasons why we didn't. there was a norm around being in the office and in particular, hubs. for example, law terms where i am in los angeles to have credibility, you need to be in century city. financial services companies felt that they needed to be on wall street to have credibility. many of those norms were shattered with the pandemic because the experiment of remote work worked remarkably well.

companies found that they improve their recruitment and retention of workers. and in many cases, they also saw productivity benefits, not across the board. and some companies there were productivity declines. but then again, it's so hard to tease out exactly what caused those declines because the pandemic was so disruptive to childcare in many other parts of work. but for the most part, the experiment went better than expected. and remote work is now here to stay at a much higher level than it was for the pandemic. there are huge change differences across the country. there are parts of the country where 3040 percent of workdays are remote, and others like mississippi were only 5 percent of work is done remotely. so this is not a uniform change across the country. but in parts of the country, remote work has become dominant. hybrid work across the country has become the dominant form of work for newly hired workers. well, you know, i know that both you and nick are in the human resources world. and you are in touch with companies. and nick, i'd just like to ask you because i don't know how your businesses work actually are

companies coming back today and saying i want to recruit people who are going to be in the office. they're going to come in know more of this remote stuff or do you guide and counsel them? nick can say, i'm sorry, you know, the world is changed and you're just going to have to deal with people who are going to work at home on mondays and fridays. i know it's going to feel like a, you know, board a work weekend, but that's just the way it is. so one of the benefits of my job is that i'm not necessarily counseling these folks by can see the decisions they are making. so for example, we can look at say, what's happening to job postings indeed. and some of the things are advertise described in the job postings. and what we can see in delays data on say the or job postings to advertise wrote work is that they are still well above where they work prior to pandemic. i'm 2019 in strong tight labor market, but obviously one that not gone through the grand experiment of remote work in the spring of 2020, about 2 to 2 and a half percent of postings. advertise remote work. now here, you know,

last month in the us it was closer to 8 and a half. now that's what it's high that was at periods or in 2021 or 2022. but that's part because there's been a pullback in hiring the lots of industries that tend to advertise around work. so think of software development jobs and the tech sector, which is really pulled back of late. so i think what we're seeing in the data is that employers are still advertising remote work. in part because of something that julia mentioned is that this is really important job seekers and helps with retention and getting hires feel into the company. we're still in a very tightly market right now where job seekers have lots of advantages in for the kinds of work that can be done remotely. lots of job seekers do consider that as a key ask for the job and employers do want to hire. they probably need to consider the remote work charging, so i might not advise all of our clients, but if i did and looking to feel the start the jobs real work is definitely

something they need a stronger look at. well, let me get you and julia and on this too, because julia, you know, i was amused when you on mosque, whom i think was off in his interview before. but you know, when he came out and said, look, if you're not going to come back to work, you're fired, kind of changed his tune. i mean, the next point you know, out there labor has some muscle at this moment. but what are you seeing in the marketplace company after company that has announced a return to the office 5 day a week mandate has backtracked very quickly. we've seen many companies come up again saying that and then within a week or 2 they've said, well, how about the 2 days a week, 3 days week, the backlash, swift was 60 percent of job seekers, said that they are looking for remote work, ideally have remote jobs we see on different craters, that job postings that are remote get about 50 percent more engagement. they're twice as likely to yield a high quality candidate. and so the recruitment benefits are huge. there are also

costs benefits and i'm talking about corporate real estate, that's relatively a relatively small line item. well, most companies budgets, especially knowledge work industry companies talking about labor costs. workers are prepared to take about a tend to 8 and 8 to 10 percent wage cut for parents of young children that goes up to a 20 percent wage cut for the opportunity to work from. oh, wow. well, let me ask you and come back to your, you know, riveting story in the experiences, the amount of money that was spent trying to prop everything up and even not during the trump, just the trump administration, but also during the, by the ministration american recovery act and what, what you know, was greater than all the money that we spent in world war 2. i mean, it's enormous amount of money. do you think we're back in a time where all that cash that came out has yet again still disguised? some of the frailty and fragility and bad habits in the economy, or are we cleaned up now? i know, i absolutely do think that, you know, federal debt is, you know,

publicly held federal debt is more than 100 percent of g d p right now. and there are some people who think that that is just completely unsustainable. there's an economic school of thought that says it's fine. i don't think we need to, to get into the minutia of that debate. but there is just so much money sloshing around and really has been since 2008. i mean, you'll remember that the fed and central banks around the world cut interest rates, basically to euro coming out of 2008 to sort of keep, to help the economy limp out of that crisis to push banks to land. the problem is that they could never win the economy often. you'll remember in the mid 20102014, in 2017. they tried to say, look, the, the punch bowl is, we're taking it away. the party is over and the markets freaked out and they, and most central banks, and frankly, politicians didn't have the stomach to stick with that. interestingly, coming out of this crisis,

they don't have an option. the inflation is so stubborn and so bad that this is sort of personally provided governments with the opportunity to do what they've wanted to do for a long time and been unable to, which is to, to kick the birds out of the nest to say to investors we are not here to save you, we do not care about your portfolio. and frankly, we are prepared to put these economies into recession to get a handle on this stuff. so just a ton of money floating around, i think looking back almost certainly the last round of stimulus in the u. s. was probably a mistake. that's a political decision. different from, you know, things like where they to lead to raise interest rates, which also yes. but yeah, i think you know, that you're talking about the kind of bad habits that have been baked in. they have returned quickly. and the one that i think of is sort of the relentless push towards efficiency. there's kind of a great mess just a little the true but of technology as we get better technology, that you can squeeze every last inefficiency out of things. and so for example,

you are very nicely holding my book. i assume that you bought that on amazon or something similar and you got it within $24.00, maybe 48 hours. there's a cost to that. it is on one level, incredibly great for consumers. but there is this the drive just in time efficiency, which is the one is little inventory as possible. you don't want the not, you know, arriving in the factory one second before it needs to be screwed into the bolt. you know what it works? well, that leads to lower prices and better products, but it means there's no fat baked in. and that was really the problem is the pandemic really crusted over the global economy and it's come right back. so i, i, people asked me a lot of we learned lessons. sadly, i'm, i'm not sure that we have well before i go to, to nick and enjoy because i want to talk to him about how, you know, not just young people that how people are thinking about work in the gig economy and scrambling to pay the bills hold this stuff together, inflation, you know, i mean, it's just, i could, you know, i could say this is going to be a lot of fun folks, or it's going to be a horrible nightmare as future,

but lives where did all the, the workers go. i mean, i was reading, i think, from your book or somewhere that 27000000 people left the job market in 2021 or 20 . that many jobs got. but when you kind of look at it and are very high openings, got very high inflation. the fed is trying to kind of slow things down, but we have so such a historically low unemployment rate right now that i'm just wondering where, where are all the people that we thought we used to have it? part of this is that we don't know, there is a real economic and academic mystery that is trying to be solved here. but a couple of places we do know which is, you know, at a human level, the pandemic forced people to kind of reassess what they want out of life, frankly. and many people decided that the job they had simply weren't worth it if they were willing to make some lifestyle changes. so that's number one. number 2 is that things like child care got very expensive and very problematic. and that

frankly, if you're to come household and the 2nd parent is barely making more than it cost to send the kid to daycare. well then you think, why am i doing this? right, so that's one another is that people delayed retirement in 2020 and so there's a little bit of catch up to be down there. you know, the, the, the obvious answer is actually not true, which is corporate lay off. a lot of big headlines, particularly out of silicon valley, but the numbers there just aren't enough to really make a dance and saw that we just got new job opening data out of the u. s. which show that slightly down, but there's still something like $22.00 and a half jobs per worker looking for them. and there's no end in sight to the sort of hourly wage war that we're seeing. so some very confusing and contradictory signals, i think being sent in the labor market, the ones that get the headlines are, and i think riley overdue that silicon valley was pretty like that. and cuz she plays for a long time and there's an efficiency that's being run out of that particular

washcloth. but you know, it's like co panel a year of noted just incredibly tight labor market, ethically tight, and the fed as having the central banks everywhere. governments are having an incredibly hard time cooling the economy because that labor engine just will not, will not stop. well, nick, the report that list was talking about, the jolts report, the job openings, labor turnover survey. and it's showing that there is just, you know, many more lay off job losses, a lot of turn out there. but what i'm interested in is how workers are approaching this right now. are they saying my future is going to be, you know, a lot of good jobs here and there and patch them together and fit in the lifestyle i want. and so that kind of keep them in the driver's seat of making choices. or are they going to get shackled, maybe shackled the wrong word, but you know, stuck in tethered to a single company, a company for a long time. what is going on in the mind of the average worker you're seeing out there? so i think we're still in

a market where job seekers have lost opportunities. you know, there was a mention of how many job things are right now and there's still, but $10800000.00 job openings at the end of january, which is, you know, up about 40 percent 40 percent for where it was proud of the pan demik. so lots of opportunities out there right now, but i think, you know, that means that there's a variety of options for workers so that there can be, say, for folks who do want it, some of these, you know, gig work or, or independent contractor. but i think at the same time it does give leverage and strengthen the bargaining position of workers at full time jobs. so, you know, we've, there's been some illusions to the fact that there is a very low low r layoff rate right now, that workers are involuntarily losing their job at high rates right now. in fact, you know, the way to stay that we have is through the end of january and the layoff rate was about 1 point one percent. that number, if you just went back, say 2019,

that would been the all time low in the series. so wes, are quite low right now. what's not low is quit the rate at which people are voluntarily leaving their jobs. and now that might sound bad on face value. hey, all these people are putting their jobs. but for the most part, when people are putting their jobs are going to pick new jobs. so it's really a sign of worker confidence. i think that's part of the underlying string forcing away market right now. there's lots of band for workers. people can switch their jobs and such a job kind of get, pay, raise that part of the reason why we have such strong pay games right now. i think to loop this back and we talked about earlier that a lot of these really strong wage gains always really strong orders, is in fact in the sectors that are art cannot be, are really, haven't been done remotely in the past bars and restaurants retail position they really came roaring back from national shock pandemic. it was still really powering for the labor market recovery we're seeing right now. or julia, let me ask you a question. could we shift is, is, let's just said, you know,

this ruthless drive to more and more efficiency to having, you know, a problem of very, very few jobs available in very low unemployment to a giant shift for all of a sudden, automation ai, you know, many new technologies come in and make a massive structural change and almost an earthquake, where the kinds of tightening we're talking about now is going to sound, you know, really anachronistic. and it, because we're going to see a very different shift around that social contract. this investment in research development is high, rose during the pandemic, and there are many firms that are trying to automate lots of different functions from customer service. i imagine that you've probably spent hours frustrated on the phone trying to find a human to speak do, rather than a chat bought. and in manufacturing and other industries as well. it said historically, during labor shortages, the biggest change actually has been an effort to recruit more workers to find them

and to bring them on board. we saw during world war 2, for example, that the companies in the north started recruiting workers from the south. they started open their doors to women, to african americans to be previously been excluded from the labor force. and we're seeing that today as well. we've seen wage compression. we've seen job growth for women and for african americans. and for workers with disabilities exceed that for other workers who were traditionally in a stronger position, labor market. another change that typically happens during lamb shortages is a big push for immigration in europe with his aging population. and instead of post for labor shortages, there have been huge guest worker programs established that does not seem to be on the political cards here. but that is something that, that would make a meaningful difference more quickly than most other policy. let me just ask liz

finally, you know, as you kind of looked at companies and how they adapted, if we were to be hit with another pandemic, we would hit with another massive storm of some kind that had global consequence. what do you think happens to the company do? what happens to labor unions? what happens do this? do we do? we see, can you see in the future at all are into what happens the way we think about corporations, government, and, and workers today. first of all, that's a bummer request and see if we just got out or you know, i would say, i think we're still reckoning with. what do we want to take out of the pandemic? and what do we want to leave in it? from a corporate point of view, which is to say, you know, you've been talking about there is a measure of flexibility and work or flexibility that i think will never totally go away. i don't fully understand the big fight in the hand wringing that everyone

seems to be having with their boss. like there's a certain amount of flexibility baked into working, going forward. by the way though, you know, one thing i'll be fascinated to look at over the next 5 or 10 years is there is a huge correlation between advancement and face time. and so you know what, what workers might want and think makes their life better and allows them to do their job more efficiently. they actually end up being a bit of an ankle way going forward. but i think a lot of that sort of changes to the day to day business of doing the job and managing company is here to stay. you know, i think one thing that i take a little comfort from, as i said earlier, just the speed with which the, you know, governments around the world reacted here. it's a slightly cobb way to think about it, but we are iterating in a positive direction and responding to crises. there is increasingly a better sense of what works and what doesn't. and i'm pretty hard and actually by the, the response, the government responses here. and again, you can have a lot of discussions and disagreements about moral hazard. but you know,

there's an interesting, i think, kind of intellectual exercise. if you'd had a pandemic that was half as bad as this one, required a response that was half as robust. you might have actually seen more disparate outcomes and gotten cleaner lessons and been able to engage more honestly in debate about lame and fault and moral hazard. the truth is, this is just so ican, obviously devastating no company, no industry is able to function when revenue goes to 0. so i think we've picked over by economists for a long time. but i think some of that you're to say, journalist and author, liz hoffman and economist julia polak with zip recruiter, dot com, and nick bunker with indeed dot com. thanks so much for being with us today. thanks . thank you very much. so what's the bottom line? 3 years after the locked downs, millions of people have died from coven millions more lives have been shattered by the virus. and people are still getting sick with different mutations. the miracle here is that human beings all around the world have figured out how to go about their business, how to manage their families, how to connect with loved ones,

how to buy stuff shop, dream travel, just generally bounce back. but the disruption to work is really permanent. companies and governments are saying come back to the office and people are resisting. most likely, some kind of compromise will be reached, where many jobs become hybrid, half in offices, and the other half. well, anywhere, there's no stopping the tech advances that have boomed in the pandemic era. but watch for days. well, we'll have an electronic version of ourselves that makes it look like where it work while we're sipping coffee in our living rooms. and that's the bottom line. ah, i care about healthy us engaging with the rest of the world. we're really, it didn't take you into a plane, you might not visit otherwise. it feels that you were there. oh.

unflinching questions is war with lawanda, imminent rigorous debate? people who are dying because of lack of medical treatment, black lives, don't really matter in the police world, join me, mark them on hill upright. what out 0, lou. i'm 0 venue window. your headlines on al jazeera this hour. it's been 3 years since the world health organization declared the corona virus outbreak, a pan demick. nearly 7000000 people across the globe lost their lives. the coven 19 says the.