Abstract
Economic crises often reveal long-standing institutional tensions rather than create them, and the COVID-19 pandemic was no exception. This article examines how disruptions to labor markets and global supply chains exposed structural vulnerabilities that had accumulated over decades through technological change, demographic contraction, and institutional choices favoring efficiency over resilience. Drawing on institutional economics, the analysis situates recent labor shortages, accelerated automation, platform-mediated employment, and supply chain fragility within a longer historical trajectory linking technological specialization, organizational governance, and the distribution of rights and power. The article integrates classical and contemporary perspectives on task displacement, labor valuation, and supply chain coordination to show how demographic aging, opaque information systems, and concentrated production networks magnified crisis impacts. Rather than treating the pandemic as a singular shock, the paper argues that it functioned as a revealing moment that rendered visible the fragility of inherited institutional arrangements. Understanding what follows the pandemic therefore requires attention to the institutional structures shaping labor and supply chains, not episodic crisis management. The analysis highlights how institutional redesign, rather than technological capability alone, will shape the evolution of economic organization beyond the pandemic.