One in 10 may have to switch jobs in US due to pandemic
Less demand for workers seen in food service, retail, hospitality
One in 10 U.S. workers — about 17 million, all told — will likely be forced to leave their jobs and take up new occupations by 2030 as COVID-19’s aftereffects destroy huge swaths of low-paying positions in a labor market that was primed for disruption before the pandemic.
Women, minorities, the young and the less educated will probably be the hardest hit by what consultant firm McKinsey & Co. foresees in a new report as an unprecedented hollowing out of low-wage work in retail, hospitality and other industries.
“COVID is a big disrupter,” said Susan Lund, a Washington-based partner at McKinsey Global Institute.
The 17 million Americans are part of the more than 100 million people worldwide that the institute forecast will need to leave their jobs and enter new lines of work by the end of the decade. That will amount to about one in 16 workers in the eight leading economies covered by the study, which includes China, Japan, Germany and the U.K., as well as the U.S.
In a more-than-130-page paper, the institute sees the pandemic accelerating three trends that will continue to upend the labor market in the years ahead: more remote work and working from home; increased e-commerce and a bigger “delivery economy”; and stepped-up business use of artificial intelligence and robots.
“The forces COVID-19 unleashed mean there could be a lot less demand for frontline workers in food service, retail, hospitality, entertainment,” Lund said.
That prompted McKinsey to lift its prepandemic estimate of how many workers will need to change occupations by 28%, or 3.8 million, to 17 million.
The fallout from the virus will also make it harder for many workers to make the switch.
“It used to be the case that a lot of lowwage workers would go from fast food, say, into retail, then retail into hospitality,” she added. “But now those jobs in aggregate are declining, so most of them will have to move up to a middle-skilled job, say in an office setting or manufacturing, or even higher.”