2021
December
13
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

December 13, 2021
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

Ever think about pulling up stakes and setting up somewhere new?

There has long been a small, robust community of new retirees considering life abroad in relaxed countries with cheap health care. Today it’s not just expat pensioners feeling footloose. As a young Monitor writer remarked recently in a meeting, some in his cohort see the unmatched “land of opportunity” label on the United States as fading.

While voluntary migration is sometimes oversold – and, for many, unaffordable – mobility seems more real. A recent national survey of some 6,000 U.S. workers had 78% indicating a desire to keep the option to work remotely for good. They point to pandemic-era evidence that knowledge work can be done well at a distance. Workers have leverage.

If they’re feeling a little ambivalent about American opportunity, younger workers are also willing to rethink success and where to find it. First came a turning away from urban centers. Digital nomadism showed up in the forms of van-lifers and people lighting out for rural Zoomtowns. Vermont offers a relocation grant program. So do Tulsa, Oklahoma; Topeka, Kansas; and other U.S. cities and regions.

Next, perhaps: a broader definition of home. As travel eases, borders blur, and not only for American prospectors. The knowledge-worker traffic is omnidirectional. Estonia welcomes innovators to its old world but highly digital hubs. Some European countries are seeking a return of top talent that had left.

Now Buenos Aires is touting Argentina’s weak currency to appeal to foreigners’ buying power – and offering a special 12-month visa to remote workers with income from abroad. The aim, according to Bloomberg City Lab: Attract 22,000 nomads by 2023. 


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Today's stories

And why we wrote them

By building up troops near Ukraine, the Kremlin has been pressuring the West to talk about NATO expansion. Amid diplomacy, Moscow feels like it might be heard. We look at its aims.

A deeper look

Morgan McOlash/Redhead Marketing & PR/Courtesy of Hilary Reiter
Hilary Reiter with her two dogs Jackson and Rusty near her home in Park City, Utah. Ms. Reiter, who heads a marketing and public relations firm, says she is "very satisfied being single and would kind of like to set the record straight on that.”

As with work arrangements, so too with relationships. For a growing number of dedicated singles, the tightly defined historical norm has become much more an option than a default.

SOURCE:

Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, 1967-2021; Pew Research Center

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Can a tribal college support its own community’s culture while also enrolling students from many other Native American groups? This story looks at how to balance preservation and inclusivity.

Points of Progress

What's going right

In our progress roundup, we find governments are giving more freedom to those who’ve been denied it, and size up some of the outcomes – from more humane policing in the U.S. to more work opportunities for women in Saudi Arabia.

Staff

Difference-maker

Photo courtesy of Munir Bahar
COR Health Institute founder Munir Bahar rehabbed the youth organization’s headquarters from the ruins of a liquor store and row houses in East Baltimore.

And here’s some progress being driven by a difference-maker: To change the way a neighborhood looks, an East Baltimore youth mentor helps young men look within themselves to find the power to become community leaders.


The Monitor's View

The booming gig economy has shaken up the world of work. It’s also raised a fundamental question: Who is an employee, anyway? 

Today anyone can download an app and start their own business. Some of the most visible gig workers are drivers who use their own vehicles to deliver people, food, or other goods. Companies like Uber, using algorithms, act as fixers between those seeking services (a ride to the airport, a meal delivered) and those offering them. 

Gig work has been a boon to millions of people. It offers many advantages including flexible work hours and the ability to pick and choose what work to accept.

But does it? Critics say that in some cases gig work has been nothing more than fake self-employment in which workers’ freedoms are so restricted they amount to being employees – but without the fringe benefits employees enjoy.

Last week the European Commission announced the biggest effort yet to bring light and fair play to the murky world of gig work. Its proposed rules would set clear standards for determining who is an employee (and deserving of the benefits of an employee) and who is a self-employed contractor. 

For example, the commission said, if companies don’t allow their gig workers to work for other companies, have rules regarding employee appearance, and require specifics about exactly how tasks must be carried out, they may have turned their gig workers into employees. 

Under the new rules, gig workers could not be fired via automated computer algorithm without explanation. Any important decisions regarding them would be conveyed through a human contact. Most importantly, employers, not the gig workers, would be asked to prove whether or not their gig workers were employees.

The goal is not to try to kill, or even hamper, the growing gig economy, Nicolas Schmit, the European Union’s jobs and social rights commissioner, said last week. What it comes down to, he said, is “ensuring that these jobs are quality jobs. ... We don’t want this new economy just giving low-quality or precarious jobs.”

Gig work includes more than drivers. Potentially, they're anyone who uses an app to seek out work. For example, many are home cleaners or home health aides. The EU says the proposed rules might affect up to 4.1 million gig workers out of the estimated 28 million in the 27-country EU. That number may reach 43 million in the next few years.

The rules are expected to take years to finalize. Pushback will come from Uber and other companies that are concerned too much regulation will restrict tech innovation in the workplace, depriving customers of convenient, affordable services they have come to depend on.

But any new system that exploits workers is a step backward. Efforts to put in place rules that ensure fair play between employers and their gig workers can benefit everyone.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Each weekday, the Monitor includes one clearly labeled religious article offering spiritual insight on contemporary issues, including the news. The publication – in its various forms – is produced for anyone who cares about the progress of the human endeavor around the world and seeks news reported with compassion, intelligence, and an essentially constructive lens. For many, that caring has religious roots. For many, it does not. The Monitor has always embraced both audiences. The Monitor is owned by a church – The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston – whose founder was concerned with both the state of the world and the quality of available news.

Though the physical Jesus is no longer here, the eternal Christ he lived and shared is ever present to comfort, heal, and light our path forward.


A message of love

Pasi Widgren/AP
A drawing of a fox appears on the frozen Pitkajarvi Lake north of Helsinki, Dec. 4, 2021. An architect-designer in southern Finland has returned to a frozen lake with a snow shovel to draw a large animal on the ice for the sixth year in a row to create a short-lived artwork that he hopes will “make people happy and encourage them to go out to hike in a beautiful nature.” The size of the fox is about 90 meters (295.3 feet) from edge to edge.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for starting your week with us. Come back tomorrow. In the wake of the devastating tornadoes that tracked across six states over the weekend, we’re working on a broader story about the role of early warning alerts in keeping down loss of life amid increasingly powerful storms. 

More issues

2021
December
13
Monday

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