On remote work for American Indians and Alaska natives

Marketplace, from American Public Media, did this story a week ago, "Telework could help tribes curb outmigration, but Native workers are being left behind."  Here's an excerpt:  

Maleah Nore has a job she’s passionate about, promoting mental health and working on suicide prevention in Native communities. But she’d like to do that work closer to the rural southeast Alaskan village where she grew up.

“Part of the reason that we’re experiencing such drain in our villages is that people are forced to move to these huge hubs,” she said, like the Portland metro area where she lives now.

A hybrid model allows Nore to sometimes work from her home office, but not from her Tlingit homelands.

“In order to do the work that we need to do to help our people and get further in this world, we have to leave our villages,” she said. “That is just counterproductive.”

Because distance makes it harder to be a good relative and community member, Nore said.

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Research from the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ Center for Indian Country Development finds that the remote work revolution could have unique benefits for tribal communities and economies, but that Native workers are being left behind.

“No one is accessing the remote work environment as little as the American Indian/Alaska Native population,” said Matthew Gregg, a senior economist at the Minneapolis Fed and an author of the report.

At the height of the pandemic, Gregg said, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows 23% of Native workers were teleworking because of COVID-19, compared to 31% of white workers.

“One of the key reasons is that there’s employment differences between whites and Native Americans,” Gregg said.

Native people are overrepresented in fields we’ve come to know as “essential,” such as health care, education and service work, and underrepresented in office jobs that are more likely to allow telework.

More than two years into the pandemic, Gregg said the telework gap has narrowed, but those occupational differences no longer explain the gap.

“In fact, within occupations, there’s a racial disparity,” he said.

Gregg and his co-author, Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution, have some ideas about what else might be going on.

“The first is access — or I should say lack of access — to broadband internet,” Maxim said.