未来的工作 The Future Of Work

More and more people are calling their home their office. They are leaving the daily grime behind, and taking care of business in cyberspace, working when and where they want. ABC's Betsy Stark has more.

Imagine a work world with no commute, no corporate headquarters, maybe no office in the physical world at all. For Bob Flavin and Joseph Jaffe, the future is already here.

These days we do so much stuff by teleconferences and things, er, that it doesn't matter where you are.

Like 42% of IBM's 350,000 employees, Bob Flavin rarely comes in to an IBM office.

We don't care where and how you get your work done, we care that you get your work done.

On the day we met him, he was collaborating with computer scientists in British, Columbia and Beijing from the on-call room of his local ambulance corps, where he works as a volunteer.

IBM says having a mobile work force saves the company about 100 million dollars a year in rent. For now it's holding on to corporate headquarters, the Crayon marketing firm makes its headquarters in cyberspace.

Here is a little roof top, we had a holiday party here.

Crayon's workers rarely meet in the physical world.
I am in Boston today.
And I am on Long Island today.

But their alter egos in the virtual world gather once a week.

Our belief is that if we bring like minds together no matter where they are in the world, we can actually create that connectedness as if we were actually here at the same place, at the same time.

For those still making a living in the real world, how does a job with summers off sound. For Jackie Pham, it's no fantasy. The Cincinnati woman works as a teller for PNC bank and gets summers off to be with her kids.

Did you ever imagine you being able to find a job that met this kind of requirements?
No, it's, er, it's pretty fantastic.

PNC hires collage students to fill in.
Collage kids like me can come and work over the summer where they can rarely work during school year/.

As baby boomers start retiring in large number, creating shortages of skilled workers, workplace experts expect more employers will offer flexible schedules. Perhaps like the one John Johns now has.

The New Jersey pharmacist is part of the CVS snowbird program, an arrangement that lets him work winters in Florida where he loves to boat, and summers on the Jersey shore where he spends free time with his grandchildren.

You come back here and everything is new again. It's like every 6 months we have a whole new lifestyle.

A job that comes with a lifestyle. Now that would be a happy Labor Day.

(transcribed by www.joozone.com)