Mastodawn

stop making the conversation about work-at-home about productivity

eliminating non-essential worker commutes means less fossil fuels wasted

remote policies increase access for disabled people, especially with chronic illness that flares

LGBT folks and PoC experience less bigotry and it's easier to report bigotry when they do

do some people want hybrid? do some people want on-site? sure

but stop pretending the discussion was about productivity or what employees want

it's about real estate portfolios

@deilann fully agreed, but tell that to the discourse manipulators in the media 8-D
Where the productivity angle becomes interesting is in the “kaiju fight” sense: there's an ongoing battle between the real estate rent seeing lobby and the “maximize profits by cutting expenses” class, and often local governments are on the rent seeker side because taxes. We need to force the balance on the other side to achieve what is best for the workers. The productivity angle helps there.
1/

@deilann even better it would be to manage to impose on the bosses all the costs of commuting, but we need a better organized workforce for that. 8-/

2/2

@oblomov sorry you were forced to read something you felt I should have somehow forced upon media giants I have no control over without others seeing it. i'll make sure to not point these things out where I see people buying and perpetuating these narratives in the future, as if my microblog isn't fully productive and entirely centered around directly addressing power it is, in fact, useless.

@deilann sorry, I didn't mean it like that. I actually enjoy finding like-minded people (although I do wish there was way to reach out to more people out there that do need it to hear it more). (Also please do let me know if you would rather prefer I edit the comment to remove the media jab, or remove the comment altogether.)

@oblomov the comment was already done - it is what it is

framing the discussion around productivity doesn't help workers in the long run as it perpetuates the narrative that we need to exploit every potential cent of a worker's labor out of them with no concern for the worker. it also is fragile as we can see with repeated narratives of studies that "prove" WAH actually is less productive "killing" remote work

making companies pay for non-essential commutes is impossible, considering the impact on climate change, urban sprawl, pollution, and risk can't truly be balanced out with payment

it also ignores the people who benefit in other ways than the reduction in commute time. if you let a corporation pay for something rather than actually change, they will. it'll just essentially become a fine.

@deilann save for a drastic change in the socioeconomic model (which I sadly don't see happening any time soon, although minds *are* starting to change), framing and costs remain the “second best” course of action, I think. Yes, they can be circumvented, but any political power that has the intent and strength to enact these changes will also have the strength to enforce them and minimize circumvention. The resurgence of unionization gives me hope that things may move in the right direction.
1/

@deilann FWIW re: the framing, I'm not saying it's what we should be doing (in fact, I really appreciated your synthetic yet in-depth first post precisely because it went against it), hence why I mentioned the “kaiju fight”: it's something that still comes from a position of power, but it's one that goes against the rent-seekers, and as long as it moves things towards WFH, I think it's better to expand on it rather than oppose it.

ah, so people like me are just supposed to wait on access to work while things "move towards" renewing our access

@deilann hm no? how did you get that from what I wrote, sorry?

@oblomov i'm legally blind

i can't commute

forcing companies to compensate for commutes means I will be excluded from the workforce again, as companies will just accept that as a "fine" a cost of doing business

@deilann would that be the case?
What we have now is:
1. companies have the power to dictate where workers work, and workers have to pay for the commute out of their own time and money;
The “cost” scenario is:
2. companies have the power to dictate where workers work, but have to factor in the cost of paying (time and money) for the workers' commute
The third scenario is something along the lines:
3. workers decide where to work, and cannot be discriminated for that.

(This is long, continue.) >

@deilann
<(continues)
What you are arguing for is that 3 is better than 2 (which I agree with), what I'm arguing for is that 2 is better than 1. Opposing 2 because it's not 3 it's “the perfect being the enemy of the good”. There's more: even in 3. you still want companies to pay the cost of workers commuting, because it's the ethical thing to do, *especially* considering that there is work that *must* be done on-premise (e.g. construction, maintenance, medical, and nearly everything on-call). >

@deilann
< IOW, “companies have to pay the cost of commuting” is a must-have regardless of whether who decides where the work is done is the employer or the employee. And in this regard, 2. is actually a stepping stone towards 3.

Moreover, I believe you're underestimating the cost-saving approaches of most companies. Outside of a few major enterprises, a lot of smaller ones would actually go under if they had to start paying workers more fairly (which includes bear the cost of their commute).

@oblomov I don't oppose 2 because it's imperfect

I oppose it because it actively excludes me and others from access to the workforce that I was granted for about 2 years and is now being ripped away

not everyone has the luxury of a commute that can be paid for and historically, if you offer 2 it'll be treated as a pat on the back look we compromised end of discussion solution

and as for "oh you could just work for small companies who can't eat the cost of the commute" that's saying "if you're disabled you'll at least have access to small companies who can't afford to pay you properly"

you're being really dismissive of the reality many disabled folks are facing where we were finally allowed the ability to make a living for ourselves and now we're being told to go back to poverty because your plan means maybe in 10 or 20 years I can be allowed back again

@deilann I'm not being dismissive, I'm saying that paying for the commute is something that should be done *regardless* of whether we're talking about 2. or 3., and that even with 2. it will be an incentive for many companies to let people WFH rather than forcing them to come to the office, which is a step up for *all* workers, including both those that cannot commute *and* those that must.

Passenger Aug 14, 2023

@oblomov @deilann

Ob, I love you like my own enby, but I feel you're not listening.

What we saw for many years before covid was that companies would refuse to hire competent people who need to work entirely remotely, and would instead hire less competent people who can commute. You can phrase this as "managers are usually bad at their jobs", which is true, or you can phrase it as "managers' desire to make money is usually lower in their priority list than their bigotries and their desire for control over their employees", which is also true.

The old argument of "why would businesses do X when they can make more money doing Y" runs aground against the repeated observation that most businesses keep doing X anyway. In the real world, managers are not perfect enlightened profit-maximisers.

On the other hand, during covid we saw that if businesses were given an absolute enforced rule of "you must let all office workers work from home, the end, no quibbles", they generally did obey that, and it created space for people who were unable to commute.

On a personal note, the company I worked for at the time absolutely tripped over its own clownshoes by insisting that everyone go back to the office. They lost most of their best staff by doing that, especially in critical tech teams, which then created bottlenecks that pushed everything else back at a huge cost. This was completely foreseeable, they were warned. Some things were more important to them than profit making.

Delian is saying that a system of incentives, like you are proposing, has been shown not to work, but a system of absolute rules has been shown to work. As such, if we want to create space for people who are unable to commute, the correct approach is obvious.

I believe in empirical evidence. I think you do too. I think you should listen.

@passenger
the fundamental misunderstanding here is that I'm not advocating 2. (the “system of incentive”) as an *alternative* to 3. (worker choice), but as a path towards, and one that can and *will* bring benefits to all workers.

I don't see how anyone can claim that the system of incentives “has been shown not to work” given that nowhere that I know of employers are forced to bear the cost of their workers' commutes —or am I missing something?

Passenger Aug 14, 2023

@oblomov @deilann

You're missing that 2 does not lead to 3, because people in power hate disabled people and workers more than they love money.

Passenger Aug 14, 2023

@oblomov @deilann

Like, you're just assuming that people are rational and bigotry does not exist, and you're making that assumption in a situation which is directly relevant to a form of bigotry.

Consider how this would look with any other form of bigotry, and then consider how your argument might make you look.

@passenger
I'm not assuming anything. But I repeat: have the employers been forced to bear the cost of the employees' commutes in any circumstances, that I'm unaware of?

And second question: given that there are work activities that have to be done on-premise, who should bear the cost of the worker commute in such cases, the employee or the employer?

Looking for explanations…Aug 15, 2023

@oblomov @passenger @deilann It’s not just about the cost of the commute. It’s the fact that some people aren’t physically capable of making the commute, but are capable of WFH. really interesting discussion on profit motives vs other reasons for back to the office. #WFH #Disabilty

Oblomov Aug 15, 2023

@Susan60 (discussion so interesting that one of the interlocutors blocked me and the other isn't replying anymore)

The thing is, the two aspects are orthogonal. Whether or not one can commute (which depends on both the kind of job and the person) doesn't (or if you will, shouldn't) bear on the fact that the cost of commuting should be paid by the employer, not the employee. And cost of commuting isn't just e.g. gas or public transportation, it's also things like time.

This is something I have always view as odd. Why? Well, like when I have to drive to my Guard unit to do my drills. I get cover for that because that is driving to go to the place I am require to do work.

Yet....civis can't do the same for their jobs?

This not even getting into differences I have noted so much between civi and mil/gov side. Like some of the benefits afforded to mil/gov are consider top perks. But, if a civi dare to have similar, folks scream communism.

Bee O'Problem

@oblomov @deilann there's also the crappy middle manager side which I've heard some allude to.

Folks who, on discovering teams self-organize just fine without their direct interference, lobby for back-to-office policies in order have something to do again.

Not all managers mind, just the ones who think their "job" is to constantly demand changes to requirements and processes. Especially those who feel walking into a workspace and interrupting people who have stuff to do is "managing"

WideEyedCurious 🇺🇸 💙 🇺🇦 & 🇨🇦Aug 14, 2023

@deilann Also frees up unneeded office space to convert to living space, which are in short supply.

Mr. Completely Aug 14, 2023

@deilann it's hard for people to grok this without understanding how corporate boards of directors work, which is an incredibly boring topic for any real human person with an actual life, but basically every corporation answers to their board, and every board is filled with rich guys with huge investments in commercial real estate who now suddenly find those investments pretty much worthless unless everyone has to go back to the office, so, guess how workplace policy gets set

River Brandon Aug 15, 2023

@mrcompletely @deilann

Semi Sentient AI Cooling Water Aug 15, 2023

@deilann Also not paid for the time or cost of commuting or having to eat out every day.

Also one often overlooked one is management find it much harder to sexually harass or bully staff over zoom.

@sentient_water and like bigotry, easier to report to HR due to easier evidence when it happens

jonathankoren™Aug 15, 2023

@deilann and power! Don't forget just petty power!

David P Aug 15, 2023

@deilann amen!

Frances Larina Aug 15, 2023

If it was about productivity, shouldn't the same management tools be used?

But they're not, are they? We're not seeing managers, directors, etc. disciplining, writing up or firing people for low productivity.

Many businesses are reporting increased productivity.

So the whole idea of it being about productivity is just a smokescreen, as you said.

What I don't get is if everyone works from home, the corporation has to pay for their fancy new campus either way. But operating costs are lower if nobody is there.

So perhaps it's just about ego and face-saving for the top decision makers?

@Frances_Larina the trouble isn't operating costs

it's property values

Frances Larina Aug 15, 2023

How do they change depending on whether workers are in the buildings or not, please?

@Frances_Larina if your campus/office building is empty or has fewer workers, it's less "attractive" so the property values of the entire area drop including nearby properties and storefronts.

you have to remember that the ultra-wealthy buy properties as an investment, not to use them, so any action that lowers their value is a threat to their wealth

Frances Larina Aug 15, 2023

I understand now, thank you for taking the time to explain it!

Ian Coldwater 👻🌿Aug 15, 2023

@deilann I read this to the tune of STOP DOING MATH, I'm so sorry

@deilann I feel like the media so often misses this point because it's not made as often, and/or they're not looking at how freaked out commercial real estate owners were when WFH got big (and/or those people tended to be a bit less likely to say anything if asked directly). The only interesting angle I've seen is complaints that WFH puts the costs of working back onto workers which... I guess, but also, scale though.

Just the utility bills for a large office building can come out to hundreds of thousands of dollars per quarter. You can't turn all the lights off at night because security needs to see, you need huge crews of cleaners, do not start me on maintenance costs...

And yes, sure, eliminating the building means putting extra costs on workers like uhhhhhhh they maybe need to pay a little extra for nicer home internet? That's a spit in the ocean in comparison to dropping $100k+ just on electricity bills for an office building. Even if the company paid all its WFH employees' internet bills in full, it'd probably still be cheaper, because a lot of services are automatically more expensive for a commercial building (sometimes justifiably so, sometimes it's a clear cash grab). At worst, this is what we have tax deductions for, and there's still rules about when the company has to provide equipment. Courier services exist.

But as you pointed out, this fucks commercial real estate owners... who nobody has liked for decades anyway. (I guess it also sucks for the handful of companies who do own their buildings outright but I feel like those were the ones who were way more receptive to WFH.)

@dartigen "remote work is killing downtowns" was the go to verbiage, if I recall correctly.

it didn't resonate well

people were like "uh why is it my job to keep downtowns alive?"

@deilann This is very true. And how many office workers really got to experience their downtown areas anyway? A 30 minute lunch break doesn't give you much time for that.

And hell, it's not like commercial real estate was doing shit about it, it was just that people were weirdly not blaming them? Probably because either nobody asked, or again they tend to be awfully cagey about speaking to the media unless they're real estate company blogs who'll uncritically repeat their line about how it's all those dastardly WFH people's fault.

Tenants, on the other hand? I hope the media here learned that as long as you keep identifying details out of it, tenants are always willing to spill about how shitty their landlord is. I'm sure there are some okayish commercial landlords, but I'm equally sure that there are plenty of shitty ones (and shitty in ways that are uniquely bad for people trying to run a business).

But as well, in a lot of cases it turns out that those downtown businesses were barely treading water for years and it was going to take literally one thing going wrong for it to all snowball. It sucks, but COVID was that one thing going wrong for a lot of systems and businesses that were only just keeping it together. I feel like workers not having time to actually go shopping or take enough of a lunch break to patronise an independent cafe instead of a chain (or BYOing lunch) didn't help matters any, but there's likely also a ton of other factors in why so many smaller CBD retail and food businesses were only just hanging in there for so long.

@dartigen and not being paid enough to afford it, yeah

99% of the "millennials are killing thing" headlines could be more honestly written as "low wages are killing thing"

and of course, workers who do buy something at the cafe are then shamed for doing so and being told it's why they're poor

there's no good answer except be pretty and create the fantasy veneer that makes property value line go up

@deilann That too - it's almost as if patronage of local businesses is also heavily dependent on the people who are local to those businesses having sufficient income for that and/or disposable income too. It's almost as if velocity of money is a thing.

There also seems to be an element of wanting quick fixes that are easy and don't require changing much, which... there is one, it's called 'give everyone a raise'. It might not necessarily fix everything, but it would fix some things, like workers not having enough money to spend in local businesses to keep them afloat.

(I don't have a lot of expectations when it comes to media reporting on this level; it was already surprising to me that the media here pointed out that a major award wage rise was still way below inflation and that was maybe kind of unfair to those workers. It's likely just the handful of sources I read regularly.

But it really does seem like a lot of these issues were only just not-bad enough to not be hugely noticeable, and then COVID happened and put just enough stress on everything to cause the kind of chaotic breakdowns that expose problems that have been going back decades. In a lot of cases, those industries that millennials supposedly killed? Were already going downhill, it just wasn't obvious to anyone who wasn't deeply involved in them.)

Tzafrir Aug 15, 2023

@deilann @dartigen
Why would you care? Because next time you'll need to buy something useful, you'll order it from Amazon or Alibaba? Because if you want to meet a friend for a chat (and no, video chat does not cut it), both of you will have to drive to the near-by town? And therefore both of you will have to keep your cars?

@tzafrir @deilann That was already starting to happen, in a lot of places. That's what I mean by how a lot of these shops and areas were only just hanging in there - at least, in some cities. In others, the downtown was already kind of dead, there just wasn't widespread WFH to be conveniently blamed for it with no examination of how that might work or what other issues might be in play.

@tzafrir @dartigen i live in a village of 1000 people and don't own a car so you're not succeeding as hard at a gotcha as you think you are

River Brandon Aug 15, 2023

@deilann @dartigen Also ironic, since it’s big, monolithic business centers and highways and parking for commuters which have been killing downtowns for decades. It’s gaslighting all the way down.

Aloopapu Aug 15, 2023

@deilann Traffic accidents are not productive.

SlightlyCyberpunk Aug 15, 2023

@deilann Yeah, my employer keeps saying we're going to be required to be in office again...hasn't happened yet...but they hired a ton of people all over the country during the pandemic; those people aren't moving up here and they can't afford to fire them so they have no choice but to remain hybrid for the foreseeable future.

And I'm good with that, I (mostly) like working from home, and I don't particularly give a crap about what's best for the company...but what they do desperately need to sort out is a method of training people that isn't still depending on leaning over and asking the guy sitting next to you when you have a question. As far as I can tell, the majority of the company has ZERO formal training process. And shit changes so often it's kinda hard to put one together, training materials from two years ago would be nearly useless already. But most people really suck at teaching things on the fly on a conference call, most people don't learn very well that way, and many people aren't great about asking for help in that environment either...and then there's the issues of it devolving into the few experieced people spending all their time bouncing between unplanned calls with the newbies...

It's not that we don't have the technology either...maybe it's just this one company (although it's a big one! And I have heard similar stories from others...) but they've gotta figure out some better ways to move information now that passive diffusion can no longer be relied upon...

Mike T.Aug 15, 2023

@deilann
"I would like to work from home a couple days each week."
Why?
"Mostly to not spend 2 hours a day commuting."
Are you going to work those 2 hours?
"No! Those are non-work hours. Why would I work extra hours?"
Why would I 'give you' 2 hours a day if you aren’t going to work?

Actual Silicon Valley conversation…
#workFromHome

Steven Woolgar Aug 15, 2023

@deilann @RedQueenCoder it’s also about tax breaks and incompetent and toxic management.

sabik Aug 15, 2023

@deilann @mpesce
It's also not, in any real sense, about covid being "over"

Covid is still with us, still just as dangerous, and few workplaces have made the adjustments to make on-site work safe

Wes Montage Aug 15, 2023

I am Jack's Lost 404 Aug 15, 2023

"eliminating non-essential worker commutes means less fossil fuels wasted"

OH! Now I get it!

Now it makes sense why the federal govt wants to end it...

Miakoda

@deilann If I could work at home, at my desk, arranged my way, with a lighting level that doesn't overwhelm me, whatever comfort or coping tools I need, and no humans popping in to disrupt my hyperfocus, and being able to have music or video on - which I need to be productive... Maybe I wouldn't need to be applying for disability.

Lett Osprey Aug 15, 2023

@deilann For autistic peeps, remote office is often a blessing. So, we have a setting that is generally good for LGBTQIA, PoC, non-NT people?

That kinda explains why so many cis-het white NT peeps are so actively fighting against remote office. They defend their advantage.

fejes Aug 15, 2023

@deilann it's striking how little has been written about the environmental impact of WFH, most of what I see in the news is negative.

Aleyna Aug 15, 2023

@deilann he who courages most to Think, he is a light bringer

dodothedev