From patients accessing health services through telemedicine to school children only being able to attend classes through remote learning, the rapid digitization of services and activities across social and economic life during the COVID-19 pandemic (especially in its early months) has provided us a snapshot of what a hyper-digital world might look like.
Unfortunately, the onset nature of the crisis also brought about rapid changes at a time when access to digital technology and skills are not equally distributed. At one end of the extreme, a recent report by Lloyd Bank showed that 11% of the adult population in the UK cannot turn on a digital device, and 13% cannot open up an app. People able to participate digitally have been able to easily continue to access services and socialize while people with less technology access have found many aspects of their lives disrupted and/or more difficult. A similar dynamic has played out in the world of work. Workers with greater levels of digital access and skills and who have jobs that can be performed remotely have experienced lesser degrees of disruption to their employment status and benefited from limiting their exposure to the virus. Meanwhile, workers unable to work from home find themselves more likely to be laid off and/or to be exposed to the virus on the way and while at work. Similarly, people who are unemployed or underemployed with lower levels of digital access now find it harder to access employment services or to apply for government benefits. The COVID pandemic thus threatens to increase inequalities between connected and disconnected individuals.
Dr. Becky Faith and Kevin Hernandez from the Digital and Technology Cluster at IDS are currently working on a project looking into how digital marginalization is playing out for vulnerable workers and the unemployed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brighton, London, and New York City. The projects consists of interviews with local government and Community Based Organisations that provide employment services (e.g. jobs training, job searching, CV help etc.) and support vulnerable people applying for benefits in the three settings. The interviews seek to tease out how the shift to remote services has affected what services can be provided, who can access them, and who is being left out and why. This project forms part of the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit), and is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/S012532/1].
Early findings from the research project suggest that members of already marginalized groups including people earning lower incomes, minorities, people with lower levels of education, migrants (especially undocumented migrants), older people, women, manual workers, and ex-prisoners, and recovering drug addicts are at greater risk of being adversely affected by rapid digitisation during COVID-19. These groups are more likely to experience negative work outcomes during COVID-19, have their career progression and life goals put on pause, and/or fall behind relative to better connected and better off workers. Along with being more likely to be digitally disconnected, the pandemic has also highlighted other ways in which marginalised groups are disconnected to work during the pandemic (and prior to it) that warrant attention including physical, social, and institutional connectivites and connectivity to the state (e.g. social protection). The latter point highlights the need for expanding the definition of what it means to be ‘connected’ and for holistic policies and programmes (or portfolios of programmes) that seek to tackle digital and other forms of disconnection together rather than in isolation.
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