Working from home returns

The government’s “Plan B”, alongside the seriously undesirable introduction of vaccine passports in England, includes the advice to work from home where possible as of this morning. This guidance from a Tory government has not prevented the Tory offensive against working from home continuing, with the Sunday Telegraph warning over the weekend of “The return of ‘shirking from home’”, concluding:

‘Working from home’ used to be a term of sarcasm, with air quotes around the phrase and a knowing smile. The suspicion is that in some cases it remains at least partly so. At the start of the pandemic, the Queen told the nation that ‘while we may have more still to endure, better days will return… We will meet again.’ Those days will return, but only if those meetings are in offices rather than just in pubs.

The enthusiastic consumer of our world-renowned free press will have been able to read variants on the Telegraph’s theme over the last 18 months or more, with those working from home are derided as “workshy refuseniks” and “lazy TWTs” who are failing to “work properly”. The Prime Minister himself has waxed eccentric about the joys of office working for the young and the “evolutionary reasons” they will feel the urge to return to the office.

All those reminiscences by professional ideologues, from Johnson to Daily Mail columnists, about the joys of office life are no doubt sincerely believed by them. They’re not actively lying when they talk it up. But their subjective feelings on the matter are not especially relevant to understanding the impact of these arguments. What matters is their function in creating a story about how an economy should function.

In a more serious register, the Tele highlights some research suggesting a negative “productivity” impact. But you can equally go and find research finding precisely the opposite case. The driver for positive impacts appears to be fairly crude, and not necessarily desirable: the loss of commuting time means more hours actually working, a factor missed in the conventional statistics. And the move to permanent home working in some form also means extended surveillance. In the US, “The number of large employers using tools to track their workers doubled since the beginning of the pandemic to 60 percent.” This includes relatively unsophisticated monitoring of keystrokes, to the use of ...