When Lockdowns Force "Everyone" to Work From Home

Inequalities in Telework During Covid-19 in Uruguay

Bibliographic Data

ID4899897
AuthorsMatias Dodel (0000-0002-1724-9609, Department of Social Sciences, Universidad Católica del Uruguay, Montevideo, Uruguay, corresponding author), María Julia Acosta (0000-0002-8230-1370, Universidad de la República de Uruguay)
Year2024
Volume68
Issue8
Pages1007-1031
Publication date2024-07-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Behavioral Scientist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7642 • E-ISSN: 1552-3381
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00027642231155370
OpenAlexW4327813994
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited24

Working from home (WFH) arrangements have been on the rise globally throughout the 21st century. Despite this trajectory, developing economies have trailed developed countries in adopting such arrangements. However, because of COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing measures, countries such as Uruguay, where teleworking was scarce and unregulated, were forced to adopt this practice to ensure business continuity. Under such conditions, preexisting organizational and individual disparities stratified the likelihood of WFH during the pandemic. Conventional wisdom holds that the main determinants potential-to-telework stems almost exclusively from the nature of jobs themselves. This article expands the traditional understanding of telework determinants by showing that during the first stages of the pandemic, individual features of the worker, and organizational and managerial features of the employer, were both determinative of the likelihood that a given worker would work from home. We conducted a secondary data analysis of the March 2020 wave of the Work Monitor, a web-based survey of 847 employed Uruguayan adults. We fitted several multivariate regression models predicting (a) the odds of working for a company which adopted COVID-19-related teleworking policies at least for some workers and (b) the odds of WFH as a consequence of COVID-19. As the adoption of telework was largely unplanned and abrupt, results show that disparities on organizational adoption of teleworking policies were related to pre-pandemic differences across organizations in terms of preparedness, technological investment, and management practices. Results also show that employers' willingness to enable WFH policies was the strongest predictor, at any level, of the likelihood of individuals to telework during the national emergency. Individual disparities in terms of human capital also have a great impact on the likelihood of teleworking during lockdowns, but their effect depends on the existence of organizational teleworking policies. Findings' implications for the present and future of telework in developing countries are discussed

Business · Closure (psychology) · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Demographic economics · Economics · Investment (military) · Logistic regression · Odds · Pandemic · Political science · Politics · Preparedness · Social distance · Telecommuting · Work (physics) · Work-Family Balance Challenges

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