>> On other hand, even if we take out the racial considerations, the fact that remote workers - already better paid than non remote - will be able to save on commuting and housing costs has its own implications for inequality.
Employers already adjust pay by city/locality, though. Not all of them do; regional and small businesses generally don't, but many major/multinational ones do. And how long do you think Google is going to keep paying Bay Area wages to every Bay Area Googler who figures they can cheap it out living in Tempe, Vegas, or Salt Lake?
I'm tempted to say that regional and small business may be vulnerable to workers going remote, but those businesses' salaries are also much more strongly determined by revenue fluctuations, and the first place any small business owner will look for savings is at that employee living high off the hog in a low-cost locale. If anything, it leads to a structural disadvantage for any firms who are pre-hoc structurally more likely to not already be locality-adjusting pay - overpay your remote employees, or skeet them and end up with the same or worse pay-to-satisfaction that you were getting before. It's kind of a wash from the theoretical side: no clear advantage with either choice.
But between those businesses and the big players, the savings workers realize from the Zoom Boom will be nonzero, but they won't be uniformly distributed, and importantly, there won't be any structural racial component to the nonuniformity on top of the global structural components which you've already identified.
I do agree that corps are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries overall. I'm always reluctant to declare winners in the "horse race" aspects of any trend; they tend to defy prediction. It's impossible to say that St. Louis will benefit more than KC or Des Moines, and impossible to say that any level of workers will disproportionately come out on top. Overall, none of the fundamentals really point to a clear conclusion in the same way as, say, the current rising wages for workers at the bottom due to labor scarcity.
>> On other hand, even if we take out the racial considerations, the fact that remote workers - already better paid than non remote - will be able to save on commuting and housing costs has its own implications for inequality.
Employers already adjust pay by city/locality, though. Not all of them do; regional and small businesses generally don't, but many major/multinational ones do. And how long do you think Google is going to keep paying Bay Area wages to every Bay Area Googler who figures they can cheap it out living in Tempe, Vegas, or Salt Lake?
I'm tempted to say that regional and small business may be vulnerable to workers going remote, but those businesses' salaries are also much more strongly determined by revenue fluctuations, and the first place any small business owner will look for savings is at that employee living high off the hog in a low-cost locale. If anything, it leads to a structural disadvantage for any firms who are pre-hoc structurally more likely to not already be locality-adjusting pay - overpay your remote employees, or skeet them and end up with the same or worse pay-to-satisfaction that you were getting before. It's kind of a wash from the theoretical side: no clear advantage with either choice.
But between those businesses and the big players, the savings workers realize from the Zoom Boom will be nonzero, but they won't be uniformly distributed, and importantly, there won't be any structural racial component to the nonuniformity on top of the global structural components which you've already identified.
I do agree that corps are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries overall. I'm always reluctant to declare winners in the "horse race" aspects of any trend; they tend to defy prediction. It's impossible to say that St. Louis will benefit more than KC or Des Moines, and impossible to say that any level of workers will disproportionately come out on top. Overall, none of the fundamentals really point to a clear conclusion in the same way as, say, the current rising wages for workers at the bottom due to labor scarcity.