July 24, 2006
Work from away | While the state touts the benefits of telecommuting, others say it's no substitute for homegrown jobs
By Chris Churchill
Gretchen Bock was sick and tired of living in suburban Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Sick of the traffic, sick of the crowds, sick of the fast pace. A New Hampshire native, she wanted to come home to northern New England. One day, she revealed her frustration to her boss. His surprising response: "If you really need to get this out of your system, you can go and take your job with you."
And with that Bock was gone, moving to South Portland last April. She began a new life in a new home, but her job remains the same ˆ she's a project manager for SRA International, a government contractor based in Fairfax. Her computer, BlackBerry and telephone connect her to the office. "It's actually not that different than if I was there," she says. "Traffic around D.C. is just phenomenal, and a lot of people work one, two or even three days a week at home."
Bock might be part of a growing trend in Maine. A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston noted that Maine residents reported job growth in 2005 that was not reflected in the payroll numbers reported by the state's businesses, suggesting more Mainers were either starting home businesses or commuting ˆ either by car or computer ˆ to out-of-state jobs.
The Baldacci administration, perhaps trying to find a silver lining in an unflattering economic report that said only hurricane-ravaged Louisiana had a worse economic year than Maine, quickly hailed the presence of telecommuters as a positive for the Maine economy. Officials argue the trend proves the state's appeal and is a source of future economic strength. "I think it's a sign of the times," says Jack Cashman, commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development. "I think [telecommuters] like living here. They don't have to live near their place of employment, so they live here."
There's no doubt decisions like the one made by Bock are flattering to Maine, reflecting the state's beauty and high quality of life. But there might be a flip side to the statistics that isn't so flattering: In-state residents are being forced to telecommute for out-of-state companies because Maine lacks the quality jobs they want. "The job that I have would not exist in Maine, and the salary would not exist in Maine," says Portland resident Sarah Wintle, who also telecommutes to Virginia as an employee of the New Teacher Project, a group that works to recruit people to the teaching profession. "And I know that's the case for a lot of people who telecommute."
Flat economy, expanding labor force
The report by the Federal Reserve was not pleasant reading for Mainers. It essentially said the state was worse than economically stagnant in 2005, losing 1,700 manufacturing jobs and 800 financial jobs amidst flat overall employment numbers. "Obviously, it was not a report we were happy with," Cashman says, "but it's a fact that the New England region was pretty flat and Maine was even flatter."
Colby College economics professor Michael Donihue says the numbers are a little misleading: Maine, he says, didn't suffer as badly as most states in the recent recession, so it had less ground to make up in 2005. But the fact remains: "Maine's not showing a lot of growth, and it's not looking like there's going to be much happening in 2006 either," Donihue says.
At the same time, the report says Maine's labor force grew the most rapidly in New England in 2005, with the labor force 1.8% larger than in 2004 ˆ despite the fact that state companies and businesses did not report adding jobs. Brad Hershbein, the Federal Reserve analyst who authored the Maine section of the report, wrote that the data "presents something of a puzzle," later adding that "these numbers suggest Maine residents are finding jobs, but not necessarily the conventional, salaried, close-to-home kind."
In an interview, Hershbein noted that Massachusetts showed the opposite trend, with companies saying they added more positions than were reported by residents (the numbers are taken from two distinct federal government surveys). The numbers suggest Maine residents increasingly could be commuting or telecommuting to jobs in the Bay State, but Hershbein stresses that firm conclusions are difficult to make. "It's really hard to pin down what's going on," he says. "All you can do is make a few educated guesses."
Some state officials, though, seem convinced of growth in telecommuting. Alan Stearns, a senior policy advisor to Gov. John Baldacci, speaks of a boom along the southern coast of residents who work for out-of-state companies. "We have a different economy today than we had in the past," Stearns says, "and one component of our new economy is that jobs are being created not just through Maine employers."
Stearns, like other state officials interviewed, sees the telecommuting trend as an unabashed good thing. "Jobs are good, and Maine people earning money is great, whether the paycheck is coming from the mail or an office building down the street," he says. "It's still money into the Maine economy."
Nicole Belson Goluboff, a Scarsdale, N.Y.-based expert on telecommuting and telecommuting law, agrees, noting that the practice has the power to transform rural communities. "You have high-earning professionals who will move to your state and spend money there," she says. "And they're going to need all sorts of services that we have in New York but might not exist in rural locations."
Develop a significant population of telecommuters in a town, Goluboff says, and you'll soon have an office products store opening nearby. There will be demand for computer technicians and new Internet-service providers. Telecommuters, she says, "bring money to spend and create job opportunities."
Still, economists warn Maine can't expect to build a strong economy on telecommuters alone. First, they say, the number of telecommuters is not likely to grow large enough to be truly transformative. And second, there are a range of benefits to having a company in state ˆ from corporate taxes paid to the local community to the creation of additional, lower-skilled jobs for, say, secretaries and janitors ˆ that telecommuting can't provide.
They add that telecommuting is hardly the solution to the state's well-documented "brain drain" of younger, educated workers. "You want to increase the potential for keeping kids here that are coming out of an education system that's pretty good," says Donihue. "But there's nothing on the horizon here."
Roadblocks on the information highway
Telecommuting has been touted as a trend of the future since the dawn of the Internet. The federal government is officially in support of the practice; the Clean Air Act even requires companies with more than 100 employees to encourage it. Telecommuting has been plugged as a solution for everything from traffic congestion to global warming to containing rapidly spreading viruses such as the bird flu.
But so far, the growth of telecommuting has not met expectations. Some analysts predicted that 50 million Americans would be telecommuting by 2005. Those forecasts were way off, perhaps because bosses still like to keep an eye on their workers and employees still like to gather by the water cooler for idle chit-chat: The U.S. Census says that 4.2 million Americans worked mostly at home in 2000, up from 3.4 million in 1990. There are about 130 million workers in the United States; 115 million, according to the census, still drive private automobiles to work.
In Maine, the census numbers show a sizeable population of at-home workers, but the numbers, which go only through 2004, don't show significant growth, or any growth at all. In 2002, five percent of Mainers worked at home; in 2004, the number had grown to 5.1%. The census also says that 4.2% of Mainers worked out-of-state in 2002; by 2004, the number of had actually shrunk, to four percent.
Still, 2005 may have been a different story. And disappointing past numbers are not tamping predictions for future telecommuting growth. Goluboff points to the coming wave of retiring Baby Boomers as a likely source for growth in the telecommuting population, because those workers may want to lessen their work load without entirely giving up on their professional lives. "Telecommuting is a great way to extend the wage-earning years of older Americans, to postpone their reliance on Social Security or other pensions," she says. "That's one segment of the population that's going to want to consider moving to Arizona or Maine."
But there are impediments to telecommuting. Some states, like New York and Pennsylvania, insist on taxing the income of workers who telecommute to the state's corporations. And Joe Kumiszcza, executive director of Westbrook-based MESDA, the state's information technology industry association, notes that telecommuters may be solo operators, but they do need a sense of community. So it might not be a bad idea for the state to create meeting places where they can occasionally gather. Kumiszcza also says the state's educational system still fails to offer opportunities for high-tech workers to update their skills ˆ an impediment for telecommuters seeking to move here.
Moreover, weaknesses in the state's access to the Internet remain a problem, something telecommuter Marcia Chappell knows well. For several years, she telecommuted to Oracle, a Silicon Valley-based software company, from her home in Georgetown. And she did so with only dial-up Internet access, because that's the only service available in the town. "It was barely manageable," Chappell says. "It certainly took a big chunk of my time waiting for uploads and downloads."
Chappell's balky Internet access was a source of bemusement to her bosses in well-wired Silicon Valley, she says, but they also made it known she would be unlikely to get future jobs at Oracle with such a poor connection. Chappell's work with Oracle ended in February, when she was laid off. That leaves her searching for other telecommuting jobs, but unlikely to get them without improved access to the World Wide Web. She says she may rent a cubicle in either Bath or Brunswick, allowing her to work for an out-of-state company ˆ but not from the comfort of her home.
Cutting the cord
Every telecommuter interviewed for this story spoke fondly of the experience ˆ of the four-foot commute, the flexibility of the schedule, the ability to cook lunch in a home kitchen and eat sitting at a dining-room table. Some did, however, speak of occasional feelings of isolation from the outside world. "I don't have a community, and it's hard for me to meet people," Bock says. "And there are days when I'll say, 'Oh my God, I haven't left my apartment in three days.'"
Still, Bock and the others interviewed want to keep telecommuting, and they want to continue living in Maine. But several didn't have confidence they could continue telecommuting for long. Bock, for example, is working on a multi-year project, but it won't last forever, and she's unsure SRA would bring a telecommuter on to manage another significant project.
Bock also is unsure she could find suitable work locally. Tentative investigations of the Portland-area job market, she says, have been discouraging, leading her to fear she might have to one day move southward. Wintle, whose job may also have a time limit, has similar fears. Whether she could find work that would allow her to remain in Portland, she says, "is the million-dollar question."
Kumiszcza at MESDA says the frustrations faced by some Maine job seekers are a reminder that the state should work to bring more companies to the state, and that a growing community of telecommuters shouldn't be considered a substitute for a growing in-state community of businesses to employ educated workers with quality jobs. "We should be luring companies here and not just saying that it's a great thing we have telecommuters," Kumiszcza says. "It is great that we have telecommuters. But it's a shame that we don't have more companies."
And with that Bock was gone, moving to South Portland last April. She began a new life in a new home, but her job remains the same ˆ she's a project manager for SRA International, a government contractor based in Fairfax. Her computer, BlackBerry and telephone connect her to the office. "It's actually not that different than if I was there," she says. "Traffic around D.C. is just phenomenal, and a lot of people work one, two or even three days a week at home."
Bock might be part of a growing trend in Maine. A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston noted that Maine residents reported job growth in 2005 that was not reflected in the payroll numbers reported by the state's businesses, suggesting more Mainers were either starting home businesses or commuting ˆ either by car or computer ˆ to out-of-state jobs.
The Baldacci administration, perhaps trying to find a silver lining in an unflattering economic report that said only hurricane-ravaged Louisiana had a worse economic year than Maine, quickly hailed the presence of telecommuters as a positive for the Maine economy. Officials argue the trend proves the state's appeal and is a source of future economic strength. "I think it's a sign of the times," says Jack Cashman, commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development. "I think [telecommuters] like living here. They don't have to live near their place of employment, so they live here."
There's no doubt decisions like the one made by Bock are flattering to Maine, reflecting the state's beauty and high quality of life. But there might be a flip side to the statistics that isn't so flattering: In-state residents are being forced to telecommute for out-of-state companies because Maine lacks the quality jobs they want. "The job that I have would not exist in Maine, and the salary would not exist in Maine," says Portland resident Sarah Wintle, who also telecommutes to Virginia as an employee of the New Teacher Project, a group that works to recruit people to the teaching profession. "And I know that's the case for a lot of people who telecommute."
Flat economy, expanding labor force
The report by the Federal Reserve was not pleasant reading for Mainers. It essentially said the state was worse than economically stagnant in 2005, losing 1,700 manufacturing jobs and 800 financial jobs amidst flat overall employment numbers. "Obviously, it was not a report we were happy with," Cashman says, "but it's a fact that the New England region was pretty flat and Maine was even flatter."
Colby College economics professor Michael Donihue says the numbers are a little misleading: Maine, he says, didn't suffer as badly as most states in the recent recession, so it had less ground to make up in 2005. But the fact remains: "Maine's not showing a lot of growth, and it's not looking like there's going to be much happening in 2006 either," Donihue says.
At the same time, the report says Maine's labor force grew the most rapidly in New England in 2005, with the labor force 1.8% larger than in 2004 ˆ despite the fact that state companies and businesses did not report adding jobs. Brad Hershbein, the Federal Reserve analyst who authored the Maine section of the report, wrote that the data "presents something of a puzzle," later adding that "these numbers suggest Maine residents are finding jobs, but not necessarily the conventional, salaried, close-to-home kind."
In an interview, Hershbein noted that Massachusetts showed the opposite trend, with companies saying they added more positions than were reported by residents (the numbers are taken from two distinct federal government surveys). The numbers suggest Maine residents increasingly could be commuting or telecommuting to jobs in the Bay State, but Hershbein stresses that firm conclusions are difficult to make. "It's really hard to pin down what's going on," he says. "All you can do is make a few educated guesses."
Some state officials, though, seem convinced of growth in telecommuting. Alan Stearns, a senior policy advisor to Gov. John Baldacci, speaks of a boom along the southern coast of residents who work for out-of-state companies. "We have a different economy today than we had in the past," Stearns says, "and one component of our new economy is that jobs are being created not just through Maine employers."
Stearns, like other state officials interviewed, sees the telecommuting trend as an unabashed good thing. "Jobs are good, and Maine people earning money is great, whether the paycheck is coming from the mail or an office building down the street," he says. "It's still money into the Maine economy."
Nicole Belson Goluboff, a Scarsdale, N.Y.-based expert on telecommuting and telecommuting law, agrees, noting that the practice has the power to transform rural communities. "You have high-earning professionals who will move to your state and spend money there," she says. "And they're going to need all sorts of services that we have in New York but might not exist in rural locations."
Develop a significant population of telecommuters in a town, Goluboff says, and you'll soon have an office products store opening nearby. There will be demand for computer technicians and new Internet-service providers. Telecommuters, she says, "bring money to spend and create job opportunities."
Still, economists warn Maine can't expect to build a strong economy on telecommuters alone. First, they say, the number of telecommuters is not likely to grow large enough to be truly transformative. And second, there are a range of benefits to having a company in state ˆ from corporate taxes paid to the local community to the creation of additional, lower-skilled jobs for, say, secretaries and janitors ˆ that telecommuting can't provide.
They add that telecommuting is hardly the solution to the state's well-documented "brain drain" of younger, educated workers. "You want to increase the potential for keeping kids here that are coming out of an education system that's pretty good," says Donihue. "But there's nothing on the horizon here."
Roadblocks on the information highway
Telecommuting has been touted as a trend of the future since the dawn of the Internet. The federal government is officially in support of the practice; the Clean Air Act even requires companies with more than 100 employees to encourage it. Telecommuting has been plugged as a solution for everything from traffic congestion to global warming to containing rapidly spreading viruses such as the bird flu.
But so far, the growth of telecommuting has not met expectations. Some analysts predicted that 50 million Americans would be telecommuting by 2005. Those forecasts were way off, perhaps because bosses still like to keep an eye on their workers and employees still like to gather by the water cooler for idle chit-chat: The U.S. Census says that 4.2 million Americans worked mostly at home in 2000, up from 3.4 million in 1990. There are about 130 million workers in the United States; 115 million, according to the census, still drive private automobiles to work.
In Maine, the census numbers show a sizeable population of at-home workers, but the numbers, which go only through 2004, don't show significant growth, or any growth at all. In 2002, five percent of Mainers worked at home; in 2004, the number had grown to 5.1%. The census also says that 4.2% of Mainers worked out-of-state in 2002; by 2004, the number of had actually shrunk, to four percent.
Still, 2005 may have been a different story. And disappointing past numbers are not tamping predictions for future telecommuting growth. Goluboff points to the coming wave of retiring Baby Boomers as a likely source for growth in the telecommuting population, because those workers may want to lessen their work load without entirely giving up on their professional lives. "Telecommuting is a great way to extend the wage-earning years of older Americans, to postpone their reliance on Social Security or other pensions," she says. "That's one segment of the population that's going to want to consider moving to Arizona or Maine."
But there are impediments to telecommuting. Some states, like New York and Pennsylvania, insist on taxing the income of workers who telecommute to the state's corporations. And Joe Kumiszcza, executive director of Westbrook-based MESDA, the state's information technology industry association, notes that telecommuters may be solo operators, but they do need a sense of community. So it might not be a bad idea for the state to create meeting places where they can occasionally gather. Kumiszcza also says the state's educational system still fails to offer opportunities for high-tech workers to update their skills ˆ an impediment for telecommuters seeking to move here.
Moreover, weaknesses in the state's access to the Internet remain a problem, something telecommuter Marcia Chappell knows well. For several years, she telecommuted to Oracle, a Silicon Valley-based software company, from her home in Georgetown. And she did so with only dial-up Internet access, because that's the only service available in the town. "It was barely manageable," Chappell says. "It certainly took a big chunk of my time waiting for uploads and downloads."
Chappell's balky Internet access was a source of bemusement to her bosses in well-wired Silicon Valley, she says, but they also made it known she would be unlikely to get future jobs at Oracle with such a poor connection. Chappell's work with Oracle ended in February, when she was laid off. That leaves her searching for other telecommuting jobs, but unlikely to get them without improved access to the World Wide Web. She says she may rent a cubicle in either Bath or Brunswick, allowing her to work for an out-of-state company ˆ but not from the comfort of her home.
Cutting the cord
Every telecommuter interviewed for this story spoke fondly of the experience ˆ of the four-foot commute, the flexibility of the schedule, the ability to cook lunch in a home kitchen and eat sitting at a dining-room table. Some did, however, speak of occasional feelings of isolation from the outside world. "I don't have a community, and it's hard for me to meet people," Bock says. "And there are days when I'll say, 'Oh my God, I haven't left my apartment in three days.'"
Still, Bock and the others interviewed want to keep telecommuting, and they want to continue living in Maine. But several didn't have confidence they could continue telecommuting for long. Bock, for example, is working on a multi-year project, but it won't last forever, and she's unsure SRA would bring a telecommuter on to manage another significant project.
Bock also is unsure she could find suitable work locally. Tentative investigations of the Portland-area job market, she says, have been discouraging, leading her to fear she might have to one day move southward. Wintle, whose job may also have a time limit, has similar fears. Whether she could find work that would allow her to remain in Portland, she says, "is the million-dollar question."
Kumiszcza at MESDA says the frustrations faced by some Maine job seekers are a reminder that the state should work to bring more companies to the state, and that a growing community of telecommuters shouldn't be considered a substitute for a growing in-state community of businesses to employ educated workers with quality jobs. "We should be luring companies here and not just saying that it's a great thing we have telecommuters," Kumiszcza says. "It is great that we have telecommuters. But it's a shame that we don't have more companies."
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