“Return to Office” mandates serve only bosses and landlords

The Herald is reporting today that the Scottish Government is creeping its civil servants back into offices despite overwhelming objections from workers and their trade unions.

Five years ago, the Covid pandemic caused a massive upheaval in the way that many of us work. After decades of remote working being a feature almost exclusively of science fiction and the very wealthy, suddenly almost everyone who had a job that could be worked from outwith an office was forced to do so. Common Weal has been a Work From Home First organisation since May 2020 and we now only require very occasional hotdesking space, or the odd ad-hoc booked meeting room for an in-person get together (when a cafe or someone’s house will not suffice).

There was a great class privilege in this, even for the lowest paid office workers, as many people were not able to work from home during the pandemic and many had to risk their health and their lives to keep essential front-line work functioning. Far too many healthcare workers, retail workers and others paid the ultimate price.

But just as not every job could be worked from home, not every home is suitable to be worked from or could be easily adapted to be so. This especially hit people who live in rented accommodations where the right to adapt one’s home was and still is a lot weaker than it is in many countries in Europe.

And yet, we adapted. People who work from home settled into a new normal. Adaptations were made where possible. Homes are increasingly being built and sold on the basis that they have a space that can be used as a private office so people don’t need to attend video calls with a blurred out image of their bedroom or kitchen as a backdrop.

There are advantages to working from home in the ability to juggle work with caring responsibilities, being able to manage chores around the house during breaks or to be in during essential deliveries (as this briefing is being written, one of our staff members is waiting for a delivery of a new washing machine).

But in the years since the height of the pandemic, more and more companies have been trying to push workers back into the office. This is happening despite objections from the workers who quite like the advantages mentioned above, along with dispensing of time spent unpaid commuting to the office, being able to take on jobs further away from one’s home and – quite importantly – very clear evidence of productivity gains from the workers.

So why are companies pushing their workers back into offices despite all of this? The first is likely to lie in managers losing the feeling of power and authority they have over being able to gaze upon the cubicle farm at their minions or to be able to micromanage in a way that further reduces productivity but makes people feel like they are using the power they’ve been granted.

The second lies in the financialisation of the workplace. Fewer companies actually own the buildings they work from but rent them instead. Their landlords demand that rent whether the building is full or empty. During the first lockdowns, companies, like Common Weal, who transitioned almost entirely to work-from-home found that they simply didn’t need those offices and left them. This very nearly created a financial crisis for the landlords of those offices (and the landlords of the coffee shops etc that cluster around those offices) and this could not be allowed to bed in as the new normal.

And so, we see a push for return to office mandates or its even worse counter-part “hybrid working” where people are expected to come into the office for a certain number of days in the week to do jobs that they could do from home (this is distinct from organising days to do the jobs that can’t be done from home).

Under hybrid working, the office can’t even really be downsized much as there’s a chance that the whole team may be “required” on the same day. This is the landlord’s dream. Companies still renting out large offices that are almost empty almost all of the time and so they get to collect rent from offices that aren’t even being used to their full potential.

As mentioned, there is a privilege in being able to work from home and from having a home that can be worked from. Companies should be pressured to do more to make it easier for workers to work from home – perhaps, as suggested in our book All of Our Futures, even extended to paying for adaptations to employees homes as if those home offices were part of the company offices or, as suggested in Sorted, by funding local hot-desk and multi-function “office hubs” where workers can easily commute (these hubs should be within able walking distance as part of the “15 minute neighbourhood”) in order to work when they can’t work from home.

As we saw in the Covid inquiry report last week, one of the key demands of the pandemic – touted at the time but apparently forgotten now – is how we “build back better” and start adapting our lives and our workplaces to a world that works for workers rather than just forces them to fit in.

The alternative is to force a return to the way things were before and a world that works for the power of managers and for the profit of landlords.