LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
Getting a Leg Up
in the New Economy
PHOTO BY TERENCE DUFFY
After more than two months of sheltering at home and the
economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,
I’m sure many of you are as anxious as I am to return to
some kind of new normalcy. As I write this, most of our Comstock’s
employees are still choosing to work remotely, and it’s
worked well. So I took the time to downsize our offices to a smaller
space in our building, and I’ll let our team work remotely, if
they choose, even after normalcy returns. I think we will see a lot
of change within companies post-COVID, as each further utilizes
the efficiencies learned the past couple of months. One of the big
changes is the popularity of Zoom meetings and other videoconferencing
tools; Comstock’s held its May Editorial Advisory Board
meeting via Zoom for the first time.
Through mid-June, the virus had sadly taken the lives
of nearly 5,300 Californians, including more than 175 in the
10-county Capital Region. And the pandemic and resulting
shelter-in-place orders have been devastating to the economy
too, sending more than 5 million Californians to the unemployment
lines as of late May. It’s likely it will be a long while before
all of those people are back at work, and some likely will need to
find a new way to make a living.
In its May report on the economy, the Federal Reserve Bank
in San Francisco told us what we already knew: “Many nonessential
businesses reported double-digit percent reductions in their
employment levels as well as cancelled hiring plans. Businesses
in the entertainment, food services, retail, and tourism sectors
were among the more severely affected.” Bartenders, waiters,
retail clerks and fast-food employees have borne the brunt of the
pandemic’s economic fallout.
We’ve also learned that the post-COVID working world will
be quite different for many people. As damaging as the pandemic
has been, it also has sped up changes that were on the economic
horizon even before the virus struck.
The Federal Reserve concluded in its April report that “lasting
impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak could accelerate the trend towards
online sales, hurting small retailers and brick-and-mortar
stores.” Locally, the closure of Nordstrom at the Arden Fair shopping
center is sad news, eliminating roughly 375 positions, one
significant example of jobs that won’t come back. We know from
the fleets of delivery trucks roaming our neighborhoods, when
people aren’t zooming from meeting to meeting on their computers,
they’re shopping online.
But the pandemic has influenced more than shopping. All of
those online meetings are a harbinger of things to come. For an
increasing number of companies, telecommuting is becoming an
accepted way to work. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example,
told workers during a livestreamed staff meeting in May that
as many as half of his company’s more than 48,000 employees
would work from home within a decade. And Jack Dorsey, CEO at
Twitter and Square, has said his employees would be allowed to
work remotely indefinitely.
Barry Broome, CEO of the Greater Sacramento Economic
Council, and other area economic leaders estimate the pandemic
advanced the use of technology in the workplace by 10 years.
According to a report from the Brookings Institution,
Sacramento was one of the last metro regions in the country
to rebound from the 2008 recession, the result of a mismatch
between the changing nature of jobs and the local labor pool.
Brookings estimated that only 6.2 percent of jobs required a
high degree of digital skill in 2002, a figure that jumped to 24.1
percent in 14 years. A study by Burning Glass Technologies in
2017 concluded that 82 percent of medium-skill jobs require
digital skills. Think about restaurant workers who manage meal
deliveries on a spreadsheet and farmers who manage irrigation
on smartphones.
The Brookings report also said that a third of Sacramento
residents, many of them Black and Latino, struggle economically.
Broome believes digital skills can make a big difference.
“A proficiency certificate in IT from Google or Salesforce can
turn a $15-an-hour job into one that pays $30 or $40,” he said
during a Sacramento County Champions Training Program
webinar in May.
That will help give people the skills they need for betterpaying
jobs and create a community of workers to attract new
business to our region, particularly in segments of the economy
that are growing globally, like fintech and cybersecurity. For
some people left jobless by the pandemic, it could give them a
much needed advantage.
Winnie Comstock-Carlson
President and Publisher
EMERGING LEADERS
Meet 10 young professionals who are making a
difference during the coronavirus pandemic. Page 34
July 2020 | comstocksmag.com 17