Announcements from major employers, including Amazon and Tabcorp, that workers will be required to return to the office five days a week have a familiar ring. There has been a steady flow of such directives. The Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, attracted a lot of attention with an announcement that workers would be required to attend the office for a minimum of 50% of the time, while the NSW public service was recently asked to return to the office at least three days a week.
But, like new year resolutions, these announcements are honoured more in the breach than the observance. The rate of remote work has barely changed since lockdowns ended three years ago. And many loudly trumpeted announcements have been quietly withdrawn. The CBA website has returned to a statement that attracts potential hires with the promise, “Our goal is to ensure the majority of our roles can be flexible so that our people can work where and how they choose.”
The minority of corporations that have managed to enforce full-time office attendance fall into two main categories. First, there are those, like Goldman Sachs, that are profitable enough to pay salaries that more than offset the cost and inconvenience of commuting to work, whether or not they gain extra productivity as a result. Second, there are companies like Grindr and Twitter (now X) that are looking for massive staff reductions and don’t care much whether the staff they lose are good or bad.
Typically, as in these two cases, such companies are engaged in the process Cory Doctorow has christened enshittification, changing the rules on their customers in an effort to squeeze as much as possible out of them before time runs out.
We might be tempted to dismiss these as isolated cases. But a recent KPMG survey found that 83% of CEOs expected a full return to the office within three years. Such a finding raises serious questions, not so much about remote work but about whether CEOs deserve the power they currently hold and the pay they currently receive.
Many of the factors contributing to corporate success or failure, such as interest and exchange rates, booms and recessions, and changes in consumer tastes are outside the control of CEOs. And the success or failure of technical innovations is, to a large extent, a matter of chance.
By contrast, the organisation of work within the corporation is something over which CEOs have a lot of control. The case of remote work shows that the CEO class as a whole failed to pick up an innovation yielding massive benefits before it was forced on them by the pandemic, and have continued to resist and resent it ever since.
The immediate impact of remote work has largely benefited employees, who save commuting time and are able to combine work and family more effectively. Some estimates suggest that the average Australian worker is willing to forgo up to 8% of their annual wage in exchange for the freedom to work remotely, and it may be much more valuable for those with high commuting costs, disabilities or unavoidable family commitments.
The logic of the labour market, in which CEOs presumably believe, implies that these benefits will be shared with employers. A worker enjoying a substantial benefit will not accept an offer from a rival company without such benefits, even at higher pay. In the end, pay and working conditions are, in the terminology of economics, fungible substitutes.
Studies on the productivity effects of WFH have had mixed results. But no one seriously suggests that any negative effects are sufficient to outweigh the benefits to workers. Rather, the claims made by CEOs largely rely on vibes – like the feelings associated with a busy office – or (what should be) irrelevant considerations such as the impact on CBD cafes. For a while it was suggested that remote work would create difficulties for new hires. But four years on, the opposite is true – many younger workers have never experienced the five-day-a-week office and may have difficulty adjusting to it.
The real concern driving CEO resistance is the fact remote work involves a previously unthinkable change in the way productive activity is structured and organised. If workers can do without the physical presence of managers, perhaps they don’t need managers at all, at least in the way they currently operate. The eagerness of CEOs and other senior managers to wish these changes away suggests that, at some level, they realise this.
As Gideon Haigh observed 20 years ago, the era of neoliberalism has been associated with the “cult of the CEO”. The office has been the shrine of that cult. In their plaintive call for a return there, CEOs are like declining deities who see their votaries deserting them.
{ 44 comments }
DocAmazing 09.27.24 at 11:58 am
You would think that shareholders would have figured this out long ago–dividends might well go up if money currently being funneled to executives became available…
afeman 09.27.24 at 1:52 pm
JQ: Thanks for the summary of the situation. What do you make of the case that opposition to WFH is also grounded in being long on investment in commercial real estate, much of which becomes redundant with a large WFH contingent?
Chris Armstrong 09.27.24 at 2:29 pm
This seems like very solid analysis, thanks John.
Interestingly, in universities I haven’t noticed much pressure to ‘get back in the office’ post-pandemic. I wonder why? One reason might be that many universities are currently engaged in enforcing various experiments in hot-desking on their staff, and some are selling off real estate. Trying to enforce office-working would present major problems in that context.
eg 09.27.24 at 2:44 pm
Precisely. 2019 is never coming back, no matter how many corporate dinosaurs roar for its return. Is there anything more ridiculous than commuting to a cubicle from which to log onto remote meetings?
Every kind of work has an ideal location somewhere on the hybrid work spectrum, and companies which get down to the serious business of identifying where its various functions lay and how to manage this reality will benefit while those resisting this process will suffer accordingly.
My recommendation to CEOs is shut up and get to work!
politicalfootball 09.27.24 at 7:31 pm
Different sorts of jobs require different working conditions, and it’s interesting to me that an academic-oriented blog is discounting the possibility that personal presence can often be sufficiently meaningful to justify its existence. Chris @3, I assume that you’re talking about office hours and not classroom time.
Kevin A. Carson 09.28.24 at 12:01 am
Cops also get pissed off when you point out that crime goes down during police strikes
J-D 09.28.24 at 12:14 am
At the university where I work, the division which my team is part of has eight ‘Collaboration Days’ each year mandated by the division head when everybody is supposed to work on-campus (for no good reason relevant to my team, although I’m not in a position to rule out the possibility that it’s valuable for some other parts of the division); except that we now don’t have the facilities on campus to accommodate the whole division working there at one time, so one team gets told to skip it.
So clearly we’re never going back to everybody on campus all the time.
Alex SL 09.28.24 at 1:06 am
whether CEOs deserve the power they currently hold and the pay they currently receive.
Well, the answer to that is “no” even if CEOs are all fully behind flexible work arrangements. They are given such power and pay because of myths useful to the CEO and upper management class such as that of the genius entrepreneur, but really they are only humans like that accountant over there or that engineer there in that other office.
What is more, I’d argue that the C suite is more fungible than accountants, HR officers, contract advisers, legal advisers, engineers, researchers, teachers, or building managers. All of these get massively more useful and productive if they know their particular workplace and its needs and challenges, whereas CEOs effortlessly get helicoptered between a large retail business, a university, a research agency, or a tech company – because their core competence, in the optimal case, is networking with and influencing other important people, and in the usual case, it is spouting buzzwords and making changes that need to be reversed five years later when they turn out to be somewhere between wasteful and catastrophic. Understanding or knowing anything specific is not part of their competence.
Regarding working from home, however, this piece misses something by casting it purely as a benefit to the employee. Like politicalfootball points out, there are jobs where it isn’t that easy. There are many parts of my work that I cannot do without physical access to specimens, microscopes, cameras, glasshouses, and laboratories, and I also enjoy my 2x 2 min cycling commute every day. But what this piece really misses is that working from home can have several downsides to the employee unless the potentially unwilling employer is willing to make significant investments:
The employee may pay privately for internet access that they now use for work at least half the time.
The employee may not have an ergonomic home office or may have to buy an ergonomic chair, desk, and other equipment out of their own pocket.
The employee may not be able to focus as well when in a home environment, potentially surrounded by children or pets.
The employee is now formally working in an environment where accidents or health crises can happen during work hours without the access to a designated first aid officer and first aid room they would have in the work place.
As the difference between free time at home and work time at work continues to blur, the right to disconnect and relax is further undermined.
Employers can be good about working from home, yes, and mine is, e.g., by providing the aforementioned ergonomic equipment, but many may see it as an opportunity to outsource significant cost and health risk onto their staff.
PD 09.28.24 at 5:45 am
Hamlet speaks of the Danish custom of getting blind drunk on social occasions. By “more honoured in the breach” he means that you would do better to remain sober. So it’s not something that people fail to do, but something they shouldn’t do in the first place.
Matt 09.28.24 at 9:48 am
Chris Armstrong said:
Interestingly, in universities I haven’t noticed much pressure to ‘get back in the office’ post-pandemic. I wonder why? One reason might be that many universities are currently engaged in enforcing various experiments in hot-desking on their staff, and some are selling off real estate. Trying to enforce office-working would present major problems in that context.
At the first university where I worked in Australia, this was forced on us – our offices were taken away, most people had, at best, a “work station”, and some had “hot desks” only. This was devistating for the work environment. It was impossible to do work “in the office”, so people didn’t come in. Because people didn’t come in, there was no community. It was also much harder to meet with students (you had to book a room), and that was also bad. There was a desire by management to enforce people to come in, but it was impossible to make it desirable in the circumstances. This was a huge contrast to everywhere I’d worked before, where there was a community of scholars. It made the job less desirable, less enjoyable, and made people do it worse. I am not sure if there are morals to draw for other fields or not, but for the community, work experience, and student experience at that university, it was almost completely negative.
Politicalfootball asked, in relation to Chris’s comment, I assume that you’re talking about office hours and not classroom time.
This, too, is changing. See for example the desire of administrators at the University of South Australia/University of Adelaide to eliminate in-person lectures. Many other universities are moving this way by making them optional and recorded. The eventual goal will be to do without them, replacing them with short film clips, first recorded by people, later largerly produced by AI, I’d guess. This will, of course, but much worse, but no doubt it will be cheaper. At least no one will have to “come to the office” to provide them!
mw 09.28.24 at 11:28 am
When thinking about t he worth/importance of CEOs, we have to keep in mind that CEOs are responsible for strategic decisions that can have long-term, make or break consequences for the company. Ford and GM have gone big on EVs while Toyota and Honda have not. How this pans out will have major effects on the success and profitability of these companies during the next decade (at the moment, it’s not looking too good for the ones that went all-in on EVs). At any rate, it may be true that you’d get the same quality of decisions out of lower-paid CEOs, but you can’t really argue their actions are unimportant.
By the same token, companies and CEOs have shown varying levels of support/tolerance for remote work and WFH. Forcing a return to the office is also a major strategic decision that (like an automaker’s heavy investment in EVs), will either bear fruit or not. Will companies be able to actually pull off return to office mandates?
And if so, how will those firms do in competition with others that continue to permit hybrid and remote work? I don’t think there’s any way to know. And it also may turn out to be the case that some kinds of firms and industries do better with one model than the other. Again, there’s no way to know in advance.
engels 09.28.24 at 11:45 am
As the difference between free time at home and work time at work continues to blur, the right to disconnect and relax is further undermined.
Yes, and spare a thought for those of us who’d like to get a coffee or lie on a beach without listening to someone excitedly shouting into their laptop in Biznish. Actually I think the end goal of the PMC is to turn the whole world into an office (they’ve already done it with gyms).
Barry 09.28.24 at 7:29 pm
“But a recent KPMG survey found that 83% of CEOs expected a full return to the office within three years. ”
ISTR that this has been the story from such surveys for 3 years now.
John Q 09.28.24 at 11:47 pm
afeman@2 I don’t think it’s a financial interest. Rather that a lot of personal identity for CEOs and senior managers is bound up with the CBD, corner offices, power lunches and so on.
PD@9 I was vaguely aware of that, but I’m a descriptivist. It’s current usage that matters.
Barry – they’ve had the same result before. If anything, bosses believe even more in the Return.
Chet Murthy 09.29.24 at 2:41 am
Matt @10: you bring up a very important point, which is the actual -environment- in the office. I’ve worked in offices where employees had a modicum of personal space, and ones where, basically, it was one giant room. The latter felt a lot like a Panopticon (and that’s what I called it to my fellow new hires). In the former office, I went in for a year-or-so, until I worked on a project that kept me at a different location for a year-ish, and after that, well, I was working individually and never working with colleagues, so I didn’t see the point in going into that office. Instead, a few years later I was in a different location of the same company, where I went into the office pretty much daily, even though I wasn’t actually working -with- the people in that office. The office was for community and connectivity. In the latter office, I made a point of sitting on another floor (the place was littered with “microkitchens”) and never sitting with my own team if I could help it. The Panopticon was oppressive as hell.
If I could have, I would have worked from home at that second office every day of the week: I mean, what use was it coming in? Colleagues almost uniformly preferred doing video calls to meeting face-to-face, after all.
And something else: if the job is going to be push-the-employees-for-all-they’re-worth, then it won’t be surprising that employees want to WFH: so that they can claw back as much as possible of their autonomy and time. If the job is going to be pretty relaxed, with lots of slack for community, for random interaction, for, frankly, idleness with colleagues, then sure, people are going to want to come in and hang out.
As an aside, I think that when employers provide massive amenities (food, exercise, play areas) in the office, it’s a sign that maybe they’re planning on pushing workers to the limit.
zamfir 09.29.24 at 8:40 am
A big aspect, I think, is that senior mangement lives for their job, at least in larger companies. Its a part of what they are selected for and what they select others on. Doing that selection is itself a major part of their job. Their part of the company runs on the goldman sacks logic – you get higher pay and status, and you are supposed to sacrifice other parts of your life for that.
From that perspective, the advantages of WFH are suspicious in themselves. Not even that you do your job badly at home, but signs that you are not ambitious enough, that you care too much about your home life to become senior management material. They might even be correct about that.
J-D 09.29.24 at 11:21 am
As seen also here, on a related point:
‘We broke our backs to get here and you didn’t say for what
‘You said this was important but it seems that it is not …
‘If this is what it takes to keep the top brass satisfied
‘Tell them all of this box-ticking leaves one feeling dead inside …
qwerty 09.29.24 at 1:26 pm
There was already a (more-or-less) work-from-home period, among the US dot-com companies around 1998-2003. I remember back then asking the boss if I could work from home, and him replying that ‘experience shows that when people “work from home” what they actually do most of that time is looking from a better-paying job’.
Alex SL 09.29.24 at 11:43 pm
That should have been 2 x 25 min commute by bicycle. Sigh.
I find it fascinating how this particular topic is treated here. Again and again a post goes up on CT casting working from home (and online-only education) as an unalloyed good only opposed by dinosaurs. Again and again it is pointed out that there are many jobs that require presence on site, be it nursing or research technician in a molecular lab, that there is tertiary education that requires presence in a lab or on a field trip, that universities will surely grasp the opportunity to replace teaching staff with recordings played on a loop, and that working from home is an opportunity for employers to push expenses and risks onto their employees in a asymmetric power relationship. And then a bit later the next post goes up arguing that working from home is an unalloyed good only opposed by dinosaurs, and clearly none of the caveats expressed by commenters have registered at all; there isn’t even an acknowledgement of them, much less an attempt at a counter or qualification.
Maybe part of the explanation is the predominance of humanities backgrounds on CT, where going online and remote is easier than in natural sciences, engineering, and health?
conchis 09.30.24 at 9:45 am
As other commenters have pointed out, part of the challenge in discussing this issue sensibly is that (a) what makes sense varies by context, (b) everyone (and I include CEOs, JQ, and myself in this) is inclined to generalise from their own context to more general lessons in ways that may not be justified.
What follows then is just one data point, rather than anything grander, but seems to offer an underrepresented perspective here. My workplace dynamic seems to evolved towards a situation where most of the junior employees (generally) prefer to be in the office, while more of the senior employees (particularly those with family commitments) spend less time in the office. I think there is also a growing recognition that this dynamic is not-ideal, and that there is (in contrast to what seems to be some others’ experience) a positive externality for junior staff from senior presence in the office (‘apprenticeship’ is sometimes a genuine thing, and part of the long term ‘employee value proposition’).
qwerty 09.30.24 at 10:37 am
19 ” Again and again a post goes up on CT casting working from home (and online-only education) as an unalloyed good only opposed by dinosaurs.”
Yes, I believe the possibility of working from home is a very good thing.
engels 09.30.24 at 11:27 am
My workplace dynamic seems to evolved towards a situation where most of the junior employees (generally) prefer to be in the office, while more of the senior employees (particularly those with family commitments) spend less time in the office.
My first workplace (in 2000s) was like this and it sucked. Did a lot for my chess though.
David in Tokyo 09.30.24 at 12:37 pm
Wind turbine maintenance is said to be a great job: good pay, benifits, and scenic views while at work.
But it doesn’t allow working from home.
And it’s kinda disoptimal for folks afraid of heights.
Harry 09.30.24 at 2:15 pm
Alex SL: “Again and again a post goes up on CT casting working from home (and online-only education) as an unalloyed good only opposed by dinosaurs.”
For what it is worth. I do think that a small number of people have figured out how to teach well on line, and a few people can learn well online, but teaching and learning in the humanities? Almost nobody can do either very well online. Every student knows this, by the way: “Online means easy” (because usually the demands are low, and cheating is easy — and this isn’t just the humanities, its true across subjects; the exceptions have to do with exceptional teachers, not subject matter). And even small online classes, even taught by people who take it seriously (requiring all cameras to be on, ensuring that they talk to all the students) lack some of the basic affordances of in-person — the few minutes chatting to students casually before and after class, a friendly smile as someone enters the room without breaking off conversation with the person you’re talking to, several people hanging around in the room continuing to discuss class material until they are kicked out by the next class, the consequent emergence of friendships based on shared academic interests.
Of course there’s loads of bad teaching in person, and bad teaching online probably isn’t much worse. And of course, maybe we’ll learn how to be good at doing it online.
During the pandemic on my campus we were allowed to teach in person, but only small classes. I usually teach a large class in the spring, and a colleague graciously took that course on to allow me to teach an additional in person course, for which I’m still extremely grateful. Maybe I am a dinosaur but I really couldn’t figure out how other people were making real learning happen online. My students, for all of whom mine were there only in person classes, reported that most of the classes they were taking were worthless. Shockingly many of them told me directly that they were cheating in most of their other classes, and in one class, when a students said “If you’re not cheating you’re not trying, are you”, every other student in the class assented, without amusement.
I used to do most of my writing at home. At the office I feel I have to be constantly interruptable, and for me doing research in philosophy requires minimum 4-hour blocks of time in which I am almost certain I won’t be interrupted. During the pandemic, and since (because my wife’s job is now much more remote) that became impossible, so I now work in the office when I must and in the library when I can.
Stephen 09.30.24 at 8:14 pm
AlexSL@19: you write that “there are many jobs that require presence on site, be it nursing or research technician in a molecular lab.” From my own experience, working in a molecular lab at levels far senior to research technician, up to and including professors, requires presence on site, and indeed sometimes working at the bench. Quelle horreur.
I realise that some CT contributors of a humanities background, rather agree with Chaucer’s Pardoner: for “preach” read “teach”‘.
For I wol preche and begge in sondry landes;
I wol nat do no labour with myne handes.
Alex SL 09.30.24 at 11:07 pm
qwerty,
Agree completely. The last person I hired asked about that flexibility, and the answer was, of course, yes. But that position was not for, say, curating our specimen collection or doing DNA library preps in the lab.
Harry,
Thanks for that perspective. Kind of shocking re cheating.
Stephen,
Yes! And my concern is that with “WFH is the future” becoming more and more the dominant narrative, some people will see a huge opportunity for cost-cutting workplace conditions. I mean, if everybody can WFH anyway, you guys don’t need proper office desks and a tea room anymore, do you? Because we can already see the dynamics around the push towards open plan offices and then hotdesking. Turns out, just because this or that person in corporate can work wherever they are given only a laptop and a headset, that doesn’t necessarily apply to people who need to spread out 200 pinned insect specimens around their computer and then compare them under a microscope.
J-D 10.01.24 at 1:44 am
Breaking Disoptimal
Disoptimal Lieutenant
The Good, The Disoptimal And The Ugly
Disoptimal, Disoptimal Leroy Brown
JakeB 10.01.24 at 5:00 am
Don’t forget the Montrose classic Disoptimal Motor Scooter, J-D.
John Q 10.02.24 at 4:18 am
Alex SL: You are making stuff up. The OP said nothing about online-only education, and I’m not aware of any CT post advocating it. More generally, the fact that not all jobs are well suited to remote work is obvious, and irrelevant to the fact that lots of jobs are well suited. It’s like opponents of a shorter working week making the point that some jobs need to be done 24/7.
As for open plan offices and hotdesking, they long predate WFH*, and are one of the reasons WFH was embraced so eagerly by those who suffered from them, and why bosses with corner offices are so keen on RTO. If they get their way, having already downsized office space, we’ll be packed in even tighter than before.
Trader Joe 10.02.24 at 10:53 am
Maybe a word from the trenches would add light.
As noted in the OP, Wall St. banks were among the first to heavily force RTO. At least in part the reason it was done as a 100% deal is a decision that its easier to demand compliance across the board than to deal out exceptions one by one. Banking was fairly uniform in this regard, other industries (especially tech oriented) basically took the 180 degree opposite view and these are the ones that seem to be paying for that choice now.
Clearly there are roles where WFH is fine and ones where RTO is superior (having bond traders deal from their bedrooms is a compliance nightmare). Bringing everyone back and then relaxing back from there was deemed a superior choice than leaving everyone home and then calling back select teams/departments etc. After being back 3 years there are now places where a return to WFH is quietly gaining and areas where clearly it will never return to how it was.
In my view, as companies employ this tactic now, they waited too long to make the decision. Its now viewed as a ‘penalty’ to have to RTO where, if it had been done the way Wall St. did it (promptly after the pandemic), relaxing back to WFH where appropriate can be viewed as a reward.
engels 10.02.24 at 11:51 am
The real concern driving CEO resistance is the fact remote work involves a previously unthinkable change in the way productive activity is structured and organised. If workers can do without the physical presence of managers, perhaps they don’t need managers at all, at least in the way they currently operate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system
Retired (gal) prof 10.02.24 at 4:03 pm
Overall, academic appointments have long showed the value of hybrid work, but as Matt @ 10 and Chet @ 15 raise, environments (and therefore outcomes) differ.
Daily work space variations: big room where people mess with your desk, hot desk and other options offering little control vs. an office with a door. The latter costs more and is less popular with the C-suite, but more conducive to work.
Shared environments and their effect on community. Many years ago at Adelaide offered a good faculty common room with printers and coffee pot, a lovely IT guy who cleaned up computer problems and added a few good features, and (best of all) a fine faculty club with a selection of local wines nearby. I was not there long, but still recall the experience fondly–I understood the values and goals of the place quickly. At my last institution, one of the University of California campuses, support staff and spaces were in short supply. This affected how the department/campus operated and hurt the quality of teaching (and even research) in many ways. I would assume that the wild excesses of early 21st-century tech firms (workout room, good child care, free and excellent food, scattered ping-pong tables) would again bring people back.
Finally, I think this whole discussion overlooks an important point. The C-suite people lose their ears-on-the-ground when people stay home and newbies lose ways to learn local practices and common values. A fully remote-work corporation is likely much harder to guide into new practices or even maintain old ones as the workforce changes.
John Q 10.02.24 at 9:46 pm
Engels @31 The analogy with putting out certainly occurred to me. It’s a form of capitalism, of course, but (in my view and as I understand Marx) typically less alienating than the factory/office. I’d be interested in a your thoughts, assuming they are more than snarks, of which I have had more than enough.
engels 10.02.24 at 11:33 pm
Sorry for the snark. I wasn’t making any point about Marx, just contradicting the seeming implication that domestic production was previously unthinkable. I don’t think Marx thought it was preferable (perhaps it could be said to be less alienated in certain specific senses, I’d be interested to know what argument/passages you have in mind). He did emphasise the positive effects for labour organisation of bringing workers together in factories alongside their oppressiveness though. I now have a vague memory of this issue being discussed before somewhere…
John Q 10.03.24 at 12:09 am
Engels, I was particularly thinking of a passage from the Fragment on Machines I cited a while back
https://crookedtimber.org/2024/05/01/52657/
And I was certainly aware of Marx making the point that bringing workers together in factories increased class awareness of oppression, as well as increasing oppression. If that was a genuinely vague memory, I’ll be happy to point you to the relevant pamphlet. Otherwise, you’re on the edge of snark there.
Alex SL 10.03.24 at 4:52 am
John Q,
If the caveats and trade-offs are obvious to you, okay, but I don’t see them mentioned in the OP, nor did I see them mentioned in several previous posts here.
I did not think I was claiming that open plan offices and hot-desking are recent, merely that they have the commonality with working from home that they are all forms of cutting costs on staff accommodation and are equally underpinned by the management belief that their staff don’t need anything more than a computer and internet access.
Apologies, however, for the claim that CT contributors advocate online only education. I was thinking of previous posts on remote education, but no, they would not have included the idea of doing away will all on site education.
John Q 10.03.24 at 6:04 am
Alex SL: As regards caveats, the post repeatedly mentions “offices”, which renders beside the point the observation that many non-office jobs can’t be done remotely.
On costs to workers, as Lenin said, we’ve voted with our feet (or maybe our hindquarters), by staying home. In nearly all cases, we could go in five days a week if we chose, there to enjoy the ergonomic offices, desks, healthy indoor air and other comforts that employers routinely provide to their office workers (irony off).
Given that you apparently share my view of how much or little employers care about their workers, I can’t fathom why you are backing them in demands that have obvious benefits for bosses and that workers everywhere are resisting with both voice and exit
engels 10.03.24 at 9:46 am
My vague memory was of the thread you linked (no snark intended).
A petty bourgeois working in her own home with her own tools isn’t alienated from the means of production (although she’s still alienated, eg from her human essence as a free, co-operative producer) but remote work doesn’t transform employees into petty bourgeois; it doesn’t even substitute the modern equivalents of hand tools (stand-alone PCs perhaps) for fixed capital (company IT systems and other centralised productive assets) so I think appealing to that sentence is a bit misleading.
Alex SL 10.03.24 at 8:56 pm
John Q,
Different people are different. Some of us prefer to be on site. As one colleague said to me on Monday, he cannot concentrate at home because there is a toddler, and as a relative said a day before that, there are kinds of conversations she can have and things she can learn from more senior colleagues only when they are all in the office together. But as you say, it may depend on how bad management has already made the office environment. If it is factory farm style rows of tables with no personal space and guaranteed infectious disease spread, sure, I understand why people would run away from that as fast as they can.
(This may be a quibble, but I would consider my job mostly ‘office’ despite needing physical specimens to do my work in that office.)
John Q 10.04.24 at 6:41 am
Alex SL: Different strokes for different folks, indeed.
Engels: From what I can tell, around half of all remote workers use their own computers to connect to their employer’s systems and a fair proportion of the rest (me, for example) use an employer-provided computer for both work and private purposes. Those in the first category seem more like hand tools to me.
As regards the second, it depends on the effectiveness with which employers monitor and control computer use. My impression is that this is more limited than is often claimed, partly because of the gap between the IT department monitoring the computer and the manager monitoring the worker.
The pure machine case is when the computer is restricted to work use only, and the worker has to buy their own personal computer, as is (or used to be) the norm for office workers.
Katherine Kirkham 10.04.24 at 9:32 am
I’m with Alex SL, to the extent that it does seem over and over that writers assume that office workers who could work from home, want to. I am an office worker who had to adapt to working from home during the pandemic and, as soon as I was able, came back to working in the office.
Why? Because at home I don’t have a suitable desk, chair or indeed space to work in. I ended up working on my sofa with my laptop on my lap. I don’t doubt that there are many people who have a lovely study or a nice sturdy kitchen table, but that’s a privilege plenty of us don’t have.
I acknowledge of course that choice is the real issue, and CEOs who want to force people into the office who would prefer to work from home are being foolish. But I do wish there was a reciprocal acknowledgement that for many people, living in cramped circumstances, the encroachment of work onto our living space is not welcome at all.
engels 10.04.24 at 10:38 am
I really don’t think we want to get too hung up on who owns the PCs. That might be 10% of a company’s assets, even if they’re tech-focussed. As pointed out on the previous thread in the days of cloud computing they’re not remotely (ahem) like standalone tools anyway. WFHers aren’t self-employed or “independent” in any real sense. I don’t think it’s bad necessarily, but over-hyped.
engels 10.04.24 at 12:05 pm
One reason I’m concerned about the hype is that Tories (blue and red) are now starting to use it as an argument for abolishing disability benefits (on the grounds that a severely agoraphobic paraplegic can now enjoy the “dignity of labour” from her bed).
conchis 10.07.24 at 12:17 am
In case it wasn’t clear from my previous comment, I think one of the interesting dynamics here, in addition to “different strokes”, is that there are plausible externalities in play. This is not to say that all demands for RTO are necessarily justified, but it may also mean that everyone just being given the freedom to make their own choices about what’s best for them might not be optimal from a collective perspective either. As with many things, I suspect that workplaces with healthy cultures are more likely to be able to manage the conversations and trade offs more successfully than others.
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