John Starke, President of the Telework Consortium, recently authored a short paper on Telework and Economic Development (Oct. 15, 2003).

The face of the U.S. workforce is changing as organizations attempt to make best of use of their knowledge workers. The need for face-to-face collaboration on high-risk, high-complexity problems means that employees are lured to large employment centers at the expense of smaller communities - as well as at the personal expense of the workers, who have to deal with increased cost of living in these same areas. Employees push back in the form of increased salary expectations. Off-shore contracting is one method of keeping labor costs down, but it has a number of issues of its own, including the loss of thousands of jobs from the U.S. economy. 

Mr. Starke offers another solution - move those jobs to small towns. In this paper he outlines what the Telework Consortium is doing to make the business case Telework as a tool for economic development. We invite you to read his 2 page paper, and send him your feedback.

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