The remote work revolution has only arrived for the ‘metropolitan elite,’ major new study argues

You may have read a lot this year about remote work.

Three years into the pandemic, life is so close to back to normal that Ticketmaster is failing to process the wild demand for Taylor Swift tickets and e-commerce shopping has come crashing back to earth as people leave their homes to return to brick-and-mortar stores.

But remote workers refuse to give in. How very privileged of them. All these years into the pandemic, remote work is still inaccessible to large parts of the workforce, according to a new working paper from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). All the media discussion about the future of the office (including this one) applies almost exclusively to a “metropolitan elite,” the paper says.