The future of work

First things first: This is intended as a standalone slab of stream-of-consciousness, and is not intended as a diatribe about COVID, its impacts or limitations, real or imagined, believed or proved. Clear enough? TL;DR - I don't like anything about working from home. End.

Working from home? I'm not a fan.

This will be a departure from my usual writing, because the subject is something that drives me wild in a momentary way, but which doesn't drag me into a search for meaning, which is where I usually tend to go. I don't give what I call 'the WFH mess' much thought, but when I do look at it, things get ugly, and quickly.

So, here we go: Working from home is, to me, a deeply awful, clumsy thing, and one which does us only ill as individuals, and as societies.

And quickly on to the odious mechanics of this bright, new (ish) 'work from home' emancipation for the digital age.

Who pays for the electricity you now use to work for a company from within your own home? How about the internet access cost? Landlines, and your mobile 'phone plan? Or the small things like note paper, and pens, and occasional printing?

Not the beneficiary; that beneficiary being your employer. To believe that you, the worker, gain from this situation is to buy a dud. Snake oil, and of a miserably cheap and smelly variety.

Are you paid a stipend for the rent of your own home for work purposes by your employer? No. Are you reimbursed for the power - on your home account - that you now use to boil water for a cup of coffee? Lighting? Aircon or heating? No.

Remind me who now pays for every part of the infrastructure of your working environment - land rates, home owner taxes, property ownership levies. Oh: You are. Not your manager, not the company, not the company's tax structure - tho the company benefits from your minimised tax visibility on their returns - and not your government. You're an entrepreneur now, remember?

And don't get me started on things like insurance, or wear and tear on your property, be it your laptop or your carpets from increased use.

The reality is that, in myriad tiny, near-invisible ways, you are now paying your employer for what is the in-reality shallow privilege of working for them. Who pays for the water - and service charges - when you take a toilet break now?

Trip as you walk from your bed to your new office, your 'living' room, and tell me what support is in place, acknowledged and, importantly, believed by your manager due to your physical presence in the workplace automatically providing evidence of injury.

(To step aside for a moment, at the use of the term 'living room' in the context of 'working from home', imagine the sound of my teeth splintering as I grind them).

Working from home is an ugly and, I fervently hope, momentary race to the bottom for our societies. At every step - at every point in the movement towards and into this horrible, stupid thing - it makes us worth less than before. It diminishes you and I, even from the already disenfranchised time-occupation that many roles in reality are.

It allows government to diminish our to-be-expected social welfare systems: You're an entrepreneur now, remember? Maybe you just shouldn't have broken your leg, you know?

Yes, it might be distantly - and very carefully - arguable that this race to the bottom is confined to the miserable ethics of the business world; a company smirking behind its hand and a quietly-said 'yes, we know it's a bad thing but we're allowed to so...' But this shallow, contemptible treatment of the individual is backed - and promoted - by our supposed representatives, proclaimed with vacuous soundbites - "you make your own decisions about how you work, now!" - and other dodges of civic responsibility.

Show me someone who's better off with working from home, and I'll show you a company behind them less-than-convinced about productivity. Show me someone proclaiming the wonderful freedoms WFH bestows upon them, and I suspect I can show you someone who works more hours, but accepts that loss of personal time for the ability to restructure what they do and how they do it - which amounts to that person paying a cost.

Does this mean the office is a vastly better, wildly more productive workspace? Of course not. But in an office, we at least don't pay to have our previously-guaranteed securities taken from us, and then proclaim the benefits we've lost as a result.

Working-from-home as some grand new era for employee emancipation? My teeth can't take much more of this grinding.