Ending Work From Home should be about workers not bosses
The Scottish Government continues to be in dispute with its civil servants’ trade union over Government policies to limit or end work from home and to mandate workers to come back into offices.
Work from home was massively expanded during the COVID pandemic lockdowns for the obvious reason that for many civil servant desk jobs, it didn’t really matter where the workers were physically located, and the pressure of the lockdowns also led to a rapid expansion and adoption of remote working tools like Zoom and Teams to make it possible.
Post-lockdown, workers found other benefits to working from home. They were no longer required to spend possibly several hours each day, unpaid, commuting to and from the office. Duties in the home, like childcare or even just taking care of loads of clothes washing, became easier. More flexible working also made it easier to attend healthcare appointments.
The workplace became easier for a lot of people, too. Workers further away from city centres could get access to jobs that might have required moving house. Workers with disabilities have, in some circumstances, found it easier to accommodate their needs in their own home than would be possible in an office. Some workers simply find it easier to work from their own home office than in a loud and uncomfortable communal one. Studies have consistently found that “work from home” has been a net benefit to worker productivity and worker happiness. Common Weal has been an entirely work-from-home workplace since the first lockdown, and several of our staff were working from home even before then.
This isn’t to say there haven’t been challenges. Some of the productivity gains have come from workers working longer hours (essentially working their commuting hours or finding it harder to “switch off” from the job when emails come in out of hours). And, yes, some of the benefits of working in the same space were also made more difficult, such as the creativity of spontaneous discussion, or collective bargaining around workers’ rights (where is the picket line in your own house?)
Importantly, just as not every job can be worked from home (we often forget that the people put at most risk of the pandemic were often low paid, public-facing “essential” workers who couldn’t be locked down), not every home is suitable to be worked from and adaptations to make that possible were sometimes difficult (particularly for tenants whose landlords did not allow or enable modifications to install a home office – many workers to this day attend Zoom calls with blurred out backgrounds of their bedroom or kitchen). Common Weal advocated for shared office spaces that could be set up as part of “15-minute neighbourhood” plans that would allow office workers who can’t work from home to still gain other benefits, like being able to avoid lengthy commutes.
But in the years since the pandemic, there has been increasing pressure to force workers who are quite happy working from home back into the office. In the private sector, the primary motivation for this was the demands of the financial sector. City-centre office landlords suddenly found that fewer people coming into the office meant that companies were downsizing their offices, and fewer commuting workers had knock-on effects on other landlord-owned buildings that hosted commercial properties like coffee shops. For a moment in time, it looked like the business model of the business district might collapse!
Enter “hybrid working”, forcing remote workers to come into the office some of the time meant that offices had to remain big enough for the entire team to come in on the same day, even if they were mostly empty the rest of the week. The landlords were saved, and rents continued to be paid.
The argument from the Scottish Government might not be quite the same (most of the buildings involved are likely publicly owned though there appears to be political pressure from right-wing politicians around the optics of empty offices) but the other argument for workers being in the office is still there too – managers sometimes like to control their workers and it’s easier to do that over their shoulder than through a webcam.
We have to remember that it is a stated goal of this Government to cut close to 20,000 public sector jobs, and there is a risk that this could be done by changing worker conditions to cut out those who find it harder to work in an office than from home, or even just to place workers under more intense scrutiny before deciding who to cut to make the target.
As said, “work from home” does not suit every worker and every home, but neither does every office. A flexible approach to working must be developed. If that means workers choosing to come back to the office, so be it. But the only way to do that is for the government to listen to workers and to build the working environment for those workers, not for external cut targets, narcissistic bosses, profiteering landlords or other factors that can only impede those workers and their ability to do their jobs.