Ewa Flaszyńska (p)

Rafael Vicente-Salar

Poland is the country that has accepted the largest number of refugees from Ukraine - since the beginning of the crisis, over 9 million people fleeing the war have crossed the border with Poland. Approx. 1.5 million of these people, mainly women and children, reside in Poland. This illustrates the scale of the challenge and the actions taken. The quick opening of the labour market and access to schools and kindergartens provided by the Act on Assistance to Ukrainian Citizens facilitated access to legal work in Poland. At the same time, the lack of forced relocation prevented refugees from being sent to regions with a weaker labor market situation. Quick integration was possible thanks to institutional solutions (quickly implemented simplified employment procedures) and the openness of business and Polish society. The aim of the paper is to analyze the one-year experience in the absorption of the Ukrainian labour force on the Polish labour market. The effects of the war in Ukraine on the Polish labour market will be analyzed depending on the short-term, medium-term and long-term effects. A direct and immediately noticeable result was the outflow of men, citizens of Ukraine, from the Polish labour market. This was a certain risk for the development of the construction industry, industrial processing and transport, which had long suffered from staff shortages. The medium-term effects of migration may be potentially positive for service industries - although one should be aware that the majority of people from Ukraine come with children, which to some extent reduces professional mobility. An increase in employment in industries with a large share of women (education, health care and social assistance, trade, other services), weakening of the pressure on wages in the mentioned sectors can be expected; increase in sales and potential increase in new jobs. At the same time, migration processes should be viewed in the long term, through the prism of the need to rebuild infrastructure in Ukraine after the end of the war. On the one hand, the internal needs of the Ukrainian market may take away employees from the Polish market, on the other hand, the reconstruction process may prove to be an opportunity for Polish construction companies in the processing and manufacturing sector, which in the long term may have a positive impact on the labour market.

Davide Rigo (p), Riccardo Crescenzi

Ewa Flaszyńska

COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the uptake of work-from-home (WFH) practices worldwide. Unique administrative data on the universe of Italian workers make it possible to assess for the first time the actual diffusion of WFH across sectors, regions and firms. Our data show that 12% of workers have in fact worked from home at the peak of the pandemic in 2020, suggesting that existing measures of WFH potential overestimate the share of jobs that can be undertaken remotely. We leverage the gap between the actual and potential share of WFH to examine the regional and firm-level determinants of WFH adoption. Our analysis provides suggestive evidence that WFH adoption at the peak of the pandemic crucially depended on a set of digital enabling factors.

Rafael Vicente-Salar (p), Hyerim Yoon, Montserrat Pallares-Barbera

Davide Rigo

With the emergence of COVID-19 at the beginning of 2020, our society entered a health crisis that further developed into an unprecedented social and economic crisis with the pandemic. The economic and welfare systems have undergone significant changes during and in the aftermath of the event, including the introduction of teleworking as a new complementary work model to in-person office attendance. The technological transformation imposed in households has presented challenges not only to workers' capacity to carry out their respective tasks at home but also on a larger scale affecting urban, social, and productive areas. However, studies analyzing and evaluating the consequences of teleworking have been developed as isolated fields of study without a conceptual and analytical framework that captures the realities of teleworking in cities. This communication aims to conduct a literature review on the consequences of teleworking from across scales with an interdisciplinary approach. It subsequently explores discussions on possible frameworks that allow for a holistic analysis of its implications in cities. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the repercussions of teleworking at an individual level before analyzing its consequences on an urban scale. Firstly, previous studies dealt with, to a greater or lesser extent, the repercussions of teleworking on workers' vulnerability, such as the risk of energy poverty, the challenges in family conciliation, and the optimal adaptation of homes to professional activities. These perspectives offer a starting point for the social analysis of teleworking in urban areas.
Secondly, the literature indicates the professional and social isolation of teleworkers. Although some authors point out the advantages of coworking spaces as optimal economic micro spaces for breaking that isolation through the configuration of cooperation networks, we call for in-depth research in this area to fill the gap in understanding the relationship between coworking spaces and post-COVID teleworkers. This perspective provides a starting point for analyzing the spatial changes in productivity resulting from teleworking in cities.
Finally, these two perspectives on teleworking need to be considered together for a holistic view as previous studies separately develop each issue, losing interesting insights which might take place in the intersection of these issues, namely, the introduction of teleworking, at-home vulnerability, including energy poverty and family conciliation, and coworking space. We argue that urban studies require a multi-disciplinary approach to understand the polyhedral nature of teleworking.