With 20.5 million jobs slashed from U.S. payrolls in April, and a 14.7 percent unemployment rate, the Covid-19 pandemic has created workforce problems unseen since the Great Depression. These dynamics are being closely observed by MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future, which released a high-profile interim report in September 2019, with a nuanced set of findings: Automation is unlikely to eliminate millions of U.S. jobs soon, but improved policies are needed to support many workers, who have been suffering from a lack of quality jobs and viable careers. The task force will issue its final report this fall.

To look at the current crisis, MIT News recently had a conversation with the three task force leaders: executive director Elisabeth B. Reynolds, who is also executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center; co-chair David Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT and associate head of MIT’s Department of Economics; and co-chair David A. Mindell, professor of aeronautics and astronautics, the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT, and founder and CEO of the Humatics Corporation.

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