Working from home returns
The UK government's "Plan B" advises working from home where possible. But the shift to mass homeworking over the last two years has contributed to a major ideological crisis.
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 facial recognition software to check someone is at their home desk. The surveillance increasingly faced by those in conventional workplaces is being extended into unconventional workplaces, and is unlikely to be rewound – not least with Amazon and others actively promoting home surveillance devices. All of which gives lie to the belief that WFH is a (to quote the Telegraph) “a flexible utopia of happy shiny employees”.
Now, there are real problems with abandoning the office. Clearly some jobs can’t, realistically, be performed at home, and these will tend to be the kind of work that is already the most insecure and undesirable – delivery riders, kitchen staff, bin workers, say. These are also likely to be the kinds of work that have had the heaviest demands placed on during the pandemic: that if you have been sitting home, logging in for your hard day’s slaving in the digital operations mine, it’s somebody else’s physical labour that has kept you supplied with Tesco deliveries at the start of the week and taken away your excess of cardboard at the end. Notice the contrasts across the different sectors shown in the official figures:
If I was minded to launch another front in the culture war, primed to target, once more, the graduates vs non-graduates divide in the working class, I’d probably go for this. The narrative pretty well writes itself, as you’ll notice from that last paragraph. A labour movement demand for the right to work flexibly has to reach across the divide: a right to work from home is unlikely to fit with everyone who works. But demands for flexibility in hours, including their reduction with no loss of pay, and greater degrees of employee control over the location of work would help. Similarly, rights to privacy – and therefore against the most intrusive workplace surveillance - can stretch across different working environments.
The ideology of work
What interests me most here, however, is the absolute insistence on the benefits of office life from official channels and their pet media. This is despite evidence that we have strongly suggesting that working from home is popular amongst those currently doing so, within some limits. A huge majority (78%) of those currently working from home in the UK would prefer to work from home three days or more out of the traditional five in the workweek. Almost a third would prefer to never to return to the office at all. The dogged insistence by the right on getting back to the office – ignoring the economic evidence and in defiance of the actual experience and opinions of those working from home – underlines the point that what we are seeing in covid is not only an economic and public health crisis. There is a crisis of ideology playing out, notably around the ideology of work.
Covid has fundamentally unsettled people’s conceptions of what “work” is, or could be. One version of this is the “Great Resignation”, which I wrote about over here. Millions of people in the developed economies have chosen to change their jobs over the last year. Union organisation may, perhaps, be picking up a bit, with the US’ “Striketober” being the most visible expression of this. The shift into home-working is a part of this. Normality has been disrupted.
Mark Fisher introduced a generation’s worth of the British left to the idea of “capitalist realism”. This was intended by him to capture the sense in which not only had alternatives to the current order of things become hard to imagine achieving, but that alternatives themselves had become unthinkable: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world,” in the clichéd phrase, variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and/or Slavoj Zizek, “than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”.
Covid doesn’t give us the end of the world – more that everything is likely to be harder, more costly and more unpleasant for the rest of our lives, involving an increased chances of death and serious illness from something that (as far as we can tell) did not exist in the human population a few years ago. Nor does it give us the end of capitalism. But it has shifted the boundaries of what is seen to be possible, and forced open questions – notably around the role and purpose of work, and its status in our lives – that otherwise had not been seriously posed on a mass scale.
I’ve argued since March last year that the key point in understanding covid’s economic impact is its disruption to the foundation of capitalism – the capital-labour relationship. Grasp this, and the entire spread of its other economic impacts becomes clear. But a disruption to the economic fundamentals of the system, on a scale never previously seen in peacetime, was never likely to happen without also producing the side-effect of disrupting how people think about the system. Covid has disrupted capital’s control of the work process, both at work and in the labour market, and millions of people, in different ways, are taking advantage of the space opened up by this relative loss of control: changing jobs, changing where they work, in some cases even organising collectively in unions.
The last is very much minority response, for now. This should not be surprising, given the extreme weakness of union organisation across the developed world. It’s not just that membership has declined (until recently) and that strike days lost have been at or near to all-time lows across the advanced economies. It is also that the very idea of organisation of work has been extinguished for millions of people. Joining a union isn’t even on the spectrum of possibilities to consider. So the response to the upset of covid has been very substantially individualised – changing jobs for better pay or conditions, for instance.
But the mass ideological impact is still there. Millions of people have had their ideas of how life is knocked out of line in the last two years. The dispute over the idea of work, and of what “good” work is, has become more intense as a result, with the pushback on working from home as a crucial moment in that. Whatever the individual motivations of journalists and politicians, the overall impact of the arguments against WFH is to produce a noisy insistence on the importance of a particular kind of capitalist normality: one in which you are once again obeying to the demand to be in a specific place, at a specific time, in a building that is not your own. The overall effect, in other words, is to symbolically reassert the power of capital over labour.
The alternative is to argue not only for workplace union organisation – this is elementary for anyone on the left – but to return to the broader question about the role, status and (above all) purpose of work. There are a common set of demands, as noted above, that can bring together flexibility of working location, reduced hours with no loss of pay, and the demand for privacy. Tying these together requires also a clarity about the ideology of work, and its alternatives.
An in-depth look at Rest of World the impact of the chip shortages on Mexican autoworkers. On one side, car companies have attempted to use enforced shutdowns in production to push through lay-offs and reduced pay. On the other, they have radicalised workers:
“The shutdowns allowed more workers to realize that our salary was already very low and that the union was not helping us,” said a member of the Executive Committee of the Independent Trade Union of Workers of the Automotive Industry (SINTTIA), a union recently created in opposition to the CTM [autoworkers’ union]. “On the contrary, they discount their dues, which add up to millions of pesos, even though we are earning less.”
Thomas Piketty and his collaborators’ new book is reviewed at the College de France website, posing the central question, “Why do social democrats no longer care about redistribution?” One answer, surely, is that they never really did. This comparative analysis of the 1980-2017 period shows that the main driver of lower inequality in Europe compared to the US has always been lower inequality before the tax system kicked in. The US tax-and-spending system is, counterintuitively, more redistributive than European system.
The inestimable Sarah Jaffe writes here on how the pandemic has unsettled perceptions of work, across society.
James Foley in Conter picks up on the conclusions of a recent survey of US working class attitudes: “Let them eat woke”.