From Remote Work to Platforms: How COVID-19 Reshaped Digital Employment Globally

The report by the ILO and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows how COVID-19 accelerated digitalization, sustaining economies through remote work, platforms, and online services while deepening inequalities between firms, workers, and regions. It calls for urgent policies to bridge digital divides, modernize labor protections, and ensure the digital future fosters inclusion rather than exclusion.

The report, prepared by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in collaboration with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, explores how digitalization transformed employment during the COVID-19 pandemic and what lessons must be carried into the future. It positions the pandemic as an unprecedented shock that fast-tracked digital adoption across businesses, governments, and households. Practices that might have taken years to evolve, remote work, online commerce, digital health services, and virtual learning, were suddenly thrust into the mainstream. This large-scale experiment revealed both the promise of digitalization as a lifeline during a crisis and the pitfalls of deepening divides between firms, workers, and communities.

Winners, Losers, and the Digital Divide

One of the report’s most striking findings is the stark contrast between winners and losers in the digital transition. Large, capital-rich companies had the infrastructure and talent to embrace remote operations quickly, while many small enterprises, especially in developing economies, lacked such capacity and struggled to survive. On the labor market side, professionals with advanced education and good internet access shifted smoothly into telework, whereas low-skilled workers in face-to-face sectors like retail, tourism, and hospitality endured massive job losses. This divide was not just economic but social: households without devices or reliable connectivity found themselves cut off from jobs, schooling, and services, while digitally prepared families managed to maintain continuity. The pandemic, therefore, magnified inequalities that had already been growing in the digital era.

Sectoral Shifts and the Rise of Platforms

The analysis paints a vivid picture of how different sectors navigated the shock. Knowledge-based industries such as IT, finance and consulting thrived under remote work, often reporting productivity gains. Manufacturing experienced supply chain turmoil but also leaned further into robotics and digital monitoring to reduce dependency on physical labor. Service industries dependent on physical presence were hardest hit, with restaurants, tourism, and cultural events decimated. Yet digital platforms surged into the gap. Food delivery apps, ride-hailing services, and freelance marketplaces expanded rapidly, offering displaced workers much-needed income. Still, these jobs often came with precarious terms, no safety nets, and little bargaining power, making platformization a double-edged sword: a source of resilience in the short term, but one that raised long-term questions about fairness and protection.

Remote Work: A Lifeline with Costs

The report devotes significant attention to remote work, which became a defining feature of pandemic-era employment. For millions of white-collar workers, it safeguarded incomes and introduced greater flexibility. Some reported enhanced work–life balance, reduced commuting stress and even higher efficiency. Yet the drawbacks were equally visible. Remote work blurred boundaries between professional and personal life, fostered isolation, and in many cases resulted in overwork. It also entrenched divisions between those who could work remotely and those whose jobs required physical presence. Women in particular bore additional pressures, as unpaid care burdens multiplied under lockdowns. Instead of leveling the playing field, remote work sometimes reinforced gender and class inequalities, suggesting that hybrid models will only be sustainable if supported by thoughtful workplace policies.

The Policy Challenge Ahead

Inequality threads through the entire report as the dominant concern. Women, young people and rural residents were disproportionately disadvantaged, while urban professionals reaped the benefits of a digitized economy. The authors argue that the central challenge for policymakers is to ensure digitalization does not harden these divides. They outline clear directions: invest in universal broadband and affordable devices to widen access; promote inclusive skill-building and lifelong learning programs to prepare workers for continuous change; update labor regulations to encompass platform jobs and hybrid work; and modernize social protection systems that remain tied to old models of formal employment. Special attention is urged for small and medium-sized enterprises, which employ the majority of the workforce worldwide but risk being left behind without tailored support in financing, training and technology adoption.

Toward a Fairer Digital Future

In its closing reflections, the report emphasizes that digitalization is not a neutral or inevitable process but one shaped by policy choices and institutional design. The pandemic showed digital tools can cushion economies against shocks, but also highlighted their capacity to worsen inequality if left ungoverned. The path forward, it insists, is not about slowing digitalization but about steering it, aligning innovation with fairness, efficiency with inclusion, and resilience with equity. If societies rise to this challenge, digitalization can become a driver of opportunity and sustainable growth. If neglected, it risks deepening precariousness and exclusion. The future of work, the report concludes, will be defined less by the technologies themselves than by how deliberately we decide to govern their use.