1. The survey found that only 63.8% said their job required a home internet connection pre pandemic, so it's closer to 40% of Americans with jobs that don't require home internet.
2. Sending emails from your phone at home is for all intents and purposes the same as a home internet connection. If you were no longer able to connect to the internet from within your home, you wouldn't be able to send those emails i.e. do your job.
3. There is a difference between jobs that can theoretically be done without home internet access, but that in practice require it. For example, you could theoretically drive a truck without any home internet. But, in practice, most truckers find loads and contracts via load boards, which you obviously need an internet connection to access.
With all of those considerations, the percentages don't seem too fishy to me. I buy that pre-pandemic, roughly 64% of Americans were in jobs that required them to connect to the internet from home for at least some work-related function, even if it is not the core of their work.
It sounds like the survey was done post-pandemic and then asked respondents whether they could've done their jobs without the Internet pre-pandemic. This is a very different survey: it means that the ~20-30% of Americans who lost their jobs in the pandemic are not included in the survey. This is almost half of the labor force (which has been hovering around 60-65% of Americans since 2009).
I'd suspect that there is strong selection bias, in that truckers, factory workers, cashiers, taxi drivers etc. were a lot more likely to lose their jobs in the pandemic and the ones that kept them are much more likely to work for "modern" companies that do require Internet. If you assume 37% of Americans are not in the labor force, 23% were unemployed and hence not in the survey, that implies 70% of the 40% remaining (~28%) require a home Internet connection, with about 3% being those whose employers recently switched to requiring Internet. That seems a lot more reasonable.
US employment rate dropped from 61.1% to 51.3%. So, around 17% of the working population lost their jobs. However, that includes many people outside of direct customer facing jobs.
> There is a difference between jobs that can theoretically be done without home internet access, but that in practice require it. For example, you could theoretically drive a truck without any home internet. But, in practice, most truckers find loads and contracts via load boards, which you obviously need an internet connection to access.
I think this is the crux of it. When you also add in jobs that require checking and responding to an email a couple of times a day, submitting a timesheet or expense reimbursement weekly, etc, then I think the numbers make sense. We're talking about jobs where 99.9% of the work is NOT done online but there are one or two quick tasks that do require an email or mobile app and so technically an internet connection is required.
Having worked for a manufacturing firm, I can guarantee that the workers doing 99% offline work are fed directly by teams that do a lot of their work online, or at least connected to a domain/email server/file server/ERP/etc.
Many of the machines running in the shop didn't have external network access (a few incidents with adult content and management just blocked everything on the floor) but still do email or access plans from the file share or work order itself. Their process was still mostly paper based including large format printing of plans with bar codes for tracking so if the network goes down they can still work.
It's this odd balance of welder demanded processes (workers would boycott new IT or automation tools so they had to hire a new guy to run a parts tower machine) combined with old school practices. When I was there 4 years ago it was mostly old dudes pushing out retirement to do 1 more year of income and buy their truck of choice while management was seeing SEC checks and auditing for tax/securities fraud. I'm surprised it's still in business at this point.
1. The survey found that only 63.8% said their job required a home internet connection pre pandemic, so it's closer to 40% of Americans with jobs that don't require home internet.
2. Sending emails from your phone at home is for all intents and purposes the same as a home internet connection. If you were no longer able to connect to the internet from within your home, you wouldn't be able to send those emails i.e. do your job.
3. There is a difference between jobs that can theoretically be done without home internet access, but that in practice require it. For example, you could theoretically drive a truck without any home internet. But, in practice, most truckers find loads and contracts via load boards, which you obviously need an internet connection to access.
With all of those considerations, the percentages don't seem too fishy to me. I buy that pre-pandemic, roughly 64% of Americans were in jobs that required them to connect to the internet from home for at least some work-related function, even if it is not the core of their work.