ATLANTA - Carolina Amero is not just the head of BellSouth's remote worker program -- she's also a client. <br>
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Rather than making the 16-mile, 45- to 60-minute drive each way from her home in suburban Stockbridge to her downtown office in Atlanta every day, Amero works from home two or three days a week and often commutes in only for half-days, avoiding both of Atlanta's notorious rush hours. <br>
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People like Amero helped fuel a 67 percent increase over the past decade in the number of Georgians who work at home -- the third-highest percentage increase in the nation and highest in the Southeast. Only Nevada and Arizona grew by a greater percentage. <br>
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New data recently released by the U-S Census Bureau show the number of Georgians working at home grew between 1990 and 2000 by almost 44 thousand. Nearly 80 percent of the new homeworkers live in metro Atlanta, where the average commute lengthened by more than five minutes a day in the last year alone. <br>
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Reasons for the growth in homeworkers range from the state's 23 percent growth in working-age residents -- it was 33 percent in metro Atlanta -- to the fact that the Internet, which facilitates working at home, didn't even exist in 1990. Still, only two-point-eight percent of Georgians work at home. And not all are telecommuters -- many are farmers or others who run home-based businesses. <br>
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Amero says the few thousand or so BellSouth employees who work at home on at least a part-time basis enjoy the flexibility it gives them for everything from running errands to exercising or picking up the kids from day care.
