from the al jazeera london broadcast and task to people in thoughtful conversation with no host and no limitation lead as a person of color, it was the struggle. it would be much easier for me might feel that white people part to guarantee chatter and thing a thong. right? skin carry other people, wait a minute, you get where you don't you stop what you're doing and maybe one studio b unscripted on out there. ah . and i there are more carlindo. these are the top stories on al jazeera chinese president. she didn't ping has said, china needs to build its military into a great wall of steel to safeguard its sovereignty. as he put the economy on security at the center of his closing speech on the final day of the national

people's congress later was elected as president for a 3rd term last week. katrina, you has more from beijing. i think he didn't think main message is that china is going to go forward and strengthen itself admits a more challenging international environments. now, as you mentioned earlier, this is she didn't being stowed speech as president. the 1st 25 and 10 years ago focused on the chinese dream, the chinese people definitely looking inward. but this 3rd speech is different because it looks outward and it looks at china's place in the world and how it's become a more challenging world for china. u. s. president joe biden says he will address issues in the banking sector on monday. that's as the federal government announced actions to assure up deposits at the silicon valley bank, reassuring customers they will have access to their money, science fiction, comedy, everything, everywhere, all at once. has clint 7 oscars, including best picture at the academy awards in los angeles,

the films that lead star michelle, jo made oscars history as the 1st asian movement. and when the best actress category, he, he one who plays the role of her husband, who's best supporting actor. thousands of protesters have been rallying in greece as anger grows over countries deadliest rail disaster. 57 people were killed last month when 2 trains collided head on, demonstrated that demanding a thorough investigation. both ukraine and russia say they've killed hundreds of enemy troops since saturday and the fight for control of back. but in eastern ukraine. he says defending the city is important to buy time for a plant counter offensive. russian course is supported by the back, the private military group say a win and backward could pave the way for further advances and opposition. politicians has accused moldova government of trying to suppress peaceful anti government rallies were in october from the main opposition. saul parsi, leather, protest, march, and the castle terms to the now on sunday,

he'll position has denounced president myers sam do saying her support for ukraine increases the chance that more dover could become embroiled in the war. i level delegation from the un security council has wrapped up a 3 day visit to eastern democratic republic of congo to assess the security situation. their delegation has stressed. a political solution is needed to end the conflict with m. 23 rebels. the did the more sooner it is clear that through under supports the m $23.00. it is also clearly established that there are incursions by the regular rondon army in north cuba and that this stuart is unacceptable. so this is one of the subjects that must be discussed and it must stop. at least 8 people have died after 2 boats carrying migrants cap sized off the coast of california. it happened on saturday night near the u. s. city of san diego . officials say the vessels were linked to an apparent human smuggling operation

and one of the deadliest maritime instance off of its kind. in the u. s. waters. hundreds of migrants have tried to force their way into the u. s. at the mexico border and large group, mostly from venezuela, demanding asylum. the u. s. officials stopped them from crossing into the country nicaragua, as president daniel ortega has ordered the closure of the vatican embassy and managua, and the nicaraguan embassy to the vatican. and rome announcement follows comments by pope frances in an interview where he compare the nicaraguan government to a dictatorship to arnold tropical cyclone. freddy has unless powerful winds heavy rains and floods in mozambique for a 2nd time. these 28 people have been killed and tens of thousands displaced. a prominent room port by south africa's anti corruption watch dog has cleared the president of wrongdoing and corruption, scandal known as farm gate. so ram, oppose who was accused of covering up the theft of an estimated $4000000.00 in his

private game farm and 2020 a criminal complaint was filed against him for alleged money laundering. these are your headlines more news after the bottom line? stay with us. ah, hi, i'm steve clements, 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 that gripped the planet at this time 3 years ago. coughing, 1900 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 light 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 release book, crash, landing the inside story of how the world's biggest companies survived in 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 work where and 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 decoded, but it changed society and lives. 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. it's a little backward looking though, which is the economy was just much more fragile than we had appreciated going into the pandemic. if you remember in early 2020, you have employment of 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 worried 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 for 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 they have. 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. i'm just interested in who you think the heroes of that moment were and who the villains were? i think civil minutia and deserve a lot of credit. here he and j. powell and both of them. by the way, i have acts of dental bureaucrats. right. i think you're making a list of who will be treasury secretary, you know, before donald trump was elected, i don't think stephen manage and would have been anywhere on it. he was a hollywood producer, been off wall street for, for years jape, how, you know, ended up at the fed under the obama administration as a compromise candidate as

a political compromise. so 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 didn't deserve 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 19291987 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 spigot that was clearly open too wide for too long. oh, thank you. well, julia polack, even the 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. 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 are 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 improved 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 and 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 before the pandemic. there are huge change differences across the country. their parts of the country are 3040 percent of work days 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 advertise wrote work is that they are still well above where they were prior. the pandemic. i'm 2019 in strong tight labor market, but obviously one that had 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 and 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 a 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 if employers do want to hire, they probably need to consider the remote work shaggy. so i might not advise all of our clients, but i did. and looking to fill these sorts of 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 liz often has interviewed 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, it didn't come the next point, you know, out there labor has some muscle at this moment. but what are you seeing in the marketplace? the 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 said, well, how about the 2 days a week, 3 days week, the backlash is swift. 60 percent of job seekers say that they are looking for remote work ideally have remote jobs. we see on different graders that job postings that are remote get about 50 percent more engagement there twice is 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 assume a relatively small line item on most companies, budgets,

especially knowledge work industry companies. talking about labor costs. workers are prepared to take about a 10 to 88 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 and 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 bite administration, american recovery, acting on 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 g d p right now. and there are

some people who think that that is 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, were taken away. the party is over, and the markets free doubt. 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, 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 then i'm able 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 this 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 to drive to just in time efficiency, which is the one little inventory as possible. you don't want the nut. we're, 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 him. 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 and 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 the 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, you know, a horrible nightmare as future, but lives where did all 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 there 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 like 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 to be 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. it was a pretty like fat and cuz she played for a long time and there's an efficiency that's being run out of that particular washcloth. but you know, as i co panel, a fear of noted it 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 churn 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 shackles 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 jobseekers have lost opportunities. you know, there was a mention of how many job things are right now, and there's still, you know, but $10800000.00 job openings at the end of january, which is, you know,

about 40 percent 40 percent for where it was proud of the pandemic. 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 to 82019, 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

involuntarily 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 quoting jobs are going to pick new jobs, there's really a sign of worker confidence. i think that's part of the underlying strength. we're seeing a landmark right now. there's lots of band for workers. people can switch their jobs and such a job can get a pay raise that part. 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. all it's really strong orders is in fact in the sectors that are, are, 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 wave market recovery we're seeing right. 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 and 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 in 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 is vestment and research development is high rose during the panoramic 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 to 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 the doors to women, to african americans to be previously been excluded from 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 labor shortages is a big push for immigration in europe with his aging population and 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 into the future at all into what happens the way we think about corporations, government, and, and workers today. first at all, that's a bummer question. say 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 and the handwriting that ever 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. may 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'd 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 mccullough way to think about it. but we are iterating in a positive direction and responding to prices, 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 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 a debate about lame and fault and moral hazard. the truth is, this is just so you can optically devastating no company, no industry is able to function when revenue goes to 0. so i think this will be 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 pollock 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 the dakota oil pipeline snaked through indigenous land, but no without resistance broke right in front of the bowl and they were beaten, arrested, and shot as protested. they all beat it and so proclaimed, watch. i protected the women of standing rock on al jazeera

with awe. so again, i'm not carlindo how these the top stories on al jazeera chinese president, she can ping has said china these to build its military into a great wall of steel, to safeguard its sovereignty. not since he put the economy unsecure.