Lawyers, accountants, people in tech such as IT specialists, coders, programmers and others whose occupations didn’t rely on physical contact were largely spared from economic collapse. Television newscasters and the press continued working, most often not from their usual studio sets or newsrooms, but they were on the job. The news did not stop – it anything it intensified, increased by an order of magnitude unlike ever seen before. A global pandemic, a presidential race, an impeachment, worldwide political and economic tensions – all of this merited coverage. Throughout the country, 65.5% of computer and math-related jobs are currently done from home, more than three times the national rate for all jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Countless service workers lost their jobs. A large majority of people who cleaned large buildings suddenly found themselves no longer needed, as those buildings became nearly empty. Cleaning and maintenance staffs were cut to the bare minimum. Bar and restaurant workers, that’s waiters and waitresses, cooks, bus boys, bartenders and bar backs, lost their job as bars and restaurants closed like dominoes. In the month of December 2020 alone, the restaurant and bar industry lost 325,000 jobs nationwide. Just in that month, the one when holiday parties, meals, and celebrations find themselves in bars and restaurants, the industry suffered massive, record-setting declines.
In agriculture and the service sectors, just 4 percent of jobs can be done remotely. Demand for agriculture met a brick wall in certain sectors. School lunches hit rock bottom numbers, eliminating that call for standard food items. Bars and restaurants suffered the worst crash ever in their category, also causing a severe drop in orders for foods from the agriculture industry. This hit employment of farm workers and owners of farms. While Corporate Farming has reduced the number of Mom & Pop or Family Farms, the latter took this hit much harder than the former. In a year when keeping the necessary farm functions persisted, the diminished sales put unfamiliar pressures on farmers. How to cut back on production? How to maintain arable lands, sustainable crops, livestock for the present and future in a new state of uncertainty?
A net effect of this conundrum was the loss of jobs: Farms running on fumes with as few employees as possible. Mom & Pop and Family farms were hit the hardest.
These issues of job losses due to the pandemic are not limited to the US. It is a global problem. The UN's International Labour Organization (ILO) found that a full 8.8 per cent of global working hours were lost in the year 2020. That’s compared to the fourth quarter of 2019. One year compared to a quarter of the year before. That loss is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs, or "approximately four times greater than the number lost during the 2009 global financial crisis," the ILO stated.