4 Reasons why too few of us will work in the future

Laetitia@Work #84

Hi everyone,

I've been on holiday for a month, and it feels like it's been a long time since I worked on a long-format post. Happy to go at it again!

"Too few of us will work in the future?" You're probably expecting yet another post about the impact of AI on work. But no—I'm quite bearish on this issue. I believe the impact of AI on work is largely overblown and that it will wipe out far less human work than we claim it will.

Nor is this piece about the upcoming stagflation (stagnation plus low employment and inflation) brought about by Trump's policies. Yes, these policies are reducing employment. Yes, young graduates are finding it hard to get jobs these days. Yes, many US federal employees have been laid off. Yes, Trump's tariffs will have a global impact on employment in export-dependent countries. Employment worries are already visible in US statistics, which Trump didn't like—so he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

But this piece is not directly about all that. Nor is it directly about population ageing and the decreasing share of working age people (yes, the share of working age people will shrink in the future).

This post is primarily about other long-term trends that will reduce the working population even more than expected if we’re not careful. These are four interconnected reasons that have little to do with "personal choices" and everything to do with the collective institutions that we're allowing to weaken and crumble, even as we should be celebrating their anniversaries.💡👇

#1: Insufficient childcare and support for working mothers

The latest US statistics tell a dispiriting story. Working mothers, who helped drive much of the job market's post-pandemic comeback, are again leaving the workforce in large numbers. The share of working mothers aged 25 to 44 with young children has fallen nearly every month this year, dropping by nearly 3 percentage points between January and June. This reversal wipes out many of the gains made by working mothers after the pandemic, when remote work arrangements and flexible schedules lured many back to the labour force.

The causes are systematic and prevalent in many other countries. Return-to-office mandates have eliminated the flexibility that made work possible for many mothers. Major corporations like J.P. Morgan, AT&T, and Amazon, as well as large swaths of the US federal government, have begun mandating that employees clock in to the office five days a week. The enforcement may be uneven, but labour economists say these requirements have added extra strain for many workers, particularly those with young children. As a result, the share of women in the US workforce has fallen since January.

As national and corporate policies turn their backs on working mothers, it’s becoming harder and harder for people with caregiving responsibilities to thrive in the labour market. An economist for the BLS compares this with the moment to the Barbie movie when Ken takes over the feminist land of Barbie with masculine ideals.

It's clear that we're backsliding in the Ken-ergy economy, that the return-to-office chest pounding is having a real ripple effect.

Childcare has reached breaking points with soaring costs and recruiting difficulties. The ripple effects extend across entire industries and the entire economy. It also means lower growth. Of course, there are also huge implications for the women themselves—their lifetime earnings will be lower, they will most likely return to jobs that don't pay the salaries they were making when they left. It'll be harder for them to get back in, harder to move up the ladder to senior management positions because of employment gaps.

👉 Also read: Women’s Experience Trap. Laetitia@Work #82

This trend may not be limited to the United States. The same conservative backlash against flexible work policies, combined with insufficient childcare infrastructure and corporate return-to-office mandates, threatens to spread this pattern to European countries as well.

#2: Housing crisis trapping workers

Housing shortages represent much more than an isolated economic issue—which is why economists John Myers, Sam Bowman, and Ben Southwood speak of "the housing theory of everything." Housing scarcity is an invisible hand shaping nearly every aspect of working lives, social structures, and even our most personal decisions about careers and family formation.

👉 Also read: How housing scarcity influences everything. Laetitia@Work #81

The digital revolution promised freedom from geography, but instead of dispersing, knowledge work has concentrated in dense urban centres. Cities like San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris have become super-magnets for tech, finance, and creative industries. The "superstar cities" offer higher wages, more opportunity, and vibrant cultural scenes. But they have systematically failed to build enough housing to accommodate their growing workforces.

For every well-paid person in knowledge work who can theoretically work anywhere, there are approximately five people in service work who usually earn significantly less. These "essential" workers—in hospitality, restaurants, elderly care, childcare, healthcare, and other service sectors—serve knowledge workers, care for their children, clean offices, and prepare meals. Unlike knowledge workers, they cannot work remotely and must live within reasonable distance of where the work is located.

This creates a “spatial mismatch”, whereby workers cannot afford to live where the jobs are. The mismatch is likely to widen as service-sector employment—especially in care work—continues to grow, while the creation of new jobs in parts of the knowledge economy slows (due to tariffs, stagflation and perhaps AI too).

When housing is scarce in high-productivity areas, many talented people are priced out entirely, preventing them from accessing better-paying jobs. Many are pushed to give up on work entirely (because it’s not worth it and their skills aren’t valued). You may find yourself stuck somewhere underemployed or unemployed because you simply can't move to where opportunity exists.

More people are forced to live further away from places where they can find quality employment and networks of care and solidarity—parents, friends, extended family, which adds to the childcare burden described in reason #1.

Furthermore climate change compounds the housing crisis by making entire regions uninsurable and uninhabitable.

#3: Population ageing and the caregiving time bomb

By 2030, more than one in four workers in France will be responsible for caring for an elderly relative. Similar trends are unfolding in every fast-ageing society. This isn’t a niche issue—it’s a structural shift in the working-age population.

The reality is stark: millions of people in their prime working years will have to reduce their hours, step back from promotions, or abandon work altogether to care for an ageing parent. The vast majority will be women, because even in households with supposedly “equal” divisions of labour, the burden of elder care falls disproportionately on them (or at least the “choice” to give up paid work for care work is overwhelmingly theirs to make). These exits from the labour market won’t just be temporary. Many will never return to their previous level of pay, seniority, or career momentum. Some will never return at all.

Already, about half of unpaid carers to older adults are employed, often juggling work with exhausting and unpredictable care duties. But without strong public support—professional carers, flexible working rights, and proper leave—many will find the juggling act impossible and be forced to leave work at precisely the stage when their experience is most valuable.

Losing a parent is always difficult. But in economic terms, the danger is what happens before the loss—when caregiving responsibilities pull thousands of skilled, experienced people out of the workforce for years at a time. Without collective action, this silent drain of talent will accelerate, weakening our economies and worsening gender inequality.

👉 Also read: The Future of Work & the Sandwich Generation. Laetitia@Work #63

#4: Deteriorating health of workers

While life expectancy has risen continually —by about 20 years since 1945—several troubling health trends now threaten to shrink the available workforce in ways we are only beginning to grasp.

Mental ill-health, particularly depression and anxiety, shows no sign of improvement despite greater awareness. Cancer rates are climbing among younger cohorts. Meanwhile, the sedentary, screen-heavy nature of much modern work is sowing the seeds of chronic conditions whose full impact will emerge over the next decades.

Perhaps most critically, workplaces have not adapted to the realities of an ageing workforce. As people work longer, employers must invest in ergonomics, equipment, and organisational design that support older bodies. Yet in countries such as France and Germany, high rates of sickness absence suggest that current working conditions are already unsustainable for many. The result: valuable, experienced workers leaving the labour market earlier than planned, often permanently.

The health crisis is also profoundly unequal. Averages conceal the truth that health outcomes are tightly bound to education and income. Poorer workers face multiple, compounding health risks that make consistent employment harder to sustain, triggering a vicious cycle: poor health leads to reduced earning power, which in turn worsens health.

In short, the workforce is ageing, but jobs remain designed for the young. Unless we close this gap—by rethinking work organisation, adapting roles, and investing in healthier workplaces—we will lose growing numbers of workers not to retirement, but to preventable ill-health.

Collective institutions are not a burden—they are the infrastructure of work

The four reasons above—insufficient childcare, the housing crisis, the care demands of an ageing population, and deteriorating worker health—are not about “personal choices.” They must be thought about in relation to the weakening of the collective institutions that sustain workers: unions and collective bargaining, the US Social Security, the French Sécurité sociale…

Eighty years ago, the French Sécurité sociale was born to enshrine collective protections: universal healthcare, family benefits, retirement pensions, and unemployment insurance. It was designed not as a cost to manage—but as the social infrastructure that would allow people to live and work with dignity.

Across the Atlantic, the United States had already enacted its own Social Security system in 1935 under President Roosevelt—which now marks its 90th anniversary. Unlike the French model, U.S. Social Security focuses mainly on pensions and disability insurance—it does not provide universal healthcare or family benefits. A chunk of it came later as Medicare, the health insurance programme for older Americans, was introduced in 1965, and 2025 marks its 60th anniversary.

Yet both systems are under strain. In France, successive reforms have curtailed unemployment benefits, eroded healthcare access while “medical deserts” expand, and tightened retirement provisions. Meanwhile, in the U.S., not only is Social Security being targeted by political forces aiming to shrink its scope, but Medicare and Medicaid are also under threat—facing budget cuts and accelerated privatisation through measures like Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (this name is so ridiculous that I don’t feel the urge to change it).

The real failure lies in cutting back foundational protections without building new ones for our era’s most pressing challenges—elderly care, affordable housing, lifelong professional reinvention, and resilience in the face of climate change. The pattern repeats across all these issues: rather than strengthening collective solutions that make work sustainable, we are dismantling them and leaving individuals to face systemic problems alone. The choice before us is stark: invest in rebuilding the collective institutions that enable people to work—universal childcare, affordable housing, comprehensive elder care, workplace health protections—or watch our workforce shrink as individuals struggle against challenges too large for any one person to overcome.

The French Sécurité sociale was built as infrastructure enabling work and welfare, not a burden on the state. I wish we were now truly celebrating its anniversary—but there is surprisingly little celebration, and far more dismantling than commemoration. It would be far better if, by the time we reach the centenary, these institutions were points of pride. To get there, we must evolve them, not dismantle them—expanding, not contracting, our collective social safety nets to meet the needs of 2025 and beyond.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote many new articles (in French):

• Masculinité sous stéroïdes

• Mince alors ! Le backlash revient

• Pilates : 7 leçons sur l’avenir du travail

• Et si vos « meilleures années » n'avaient pas commencé ?

• Août, mois sacré : un trésor français

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Miscellaneous

😪 Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’, Catherine Pearson, The New York Times, July 2025: “mankeeping. The term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends. “What I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central — if not the central — piece of a man’s social support system”.

Happy birthday to both Social Security and Sécurité sociale—may your next decades be healthier, fairer, and better celebrated than this one! 🎂