Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

[Sean Hayden]

What kind of work from home are you imagining here?

[laklak]

Unregistered, uninspected home stripper poles can be quite dangerous.

[Sean Hayden]

I forgot they aren't allowed to change a bulb in Europe.

[laklak]

Well, they do have those weird pin things on their bulbs. Maybe it's like Avocado Hand, they keep hurting themselves.

[Sean Hayden]

Avocado Hand --dear god

[L'Emmerdeur]

Not maintaining the same level of physical premises, the employer's balance sheet benefits. What of the worker?

[Hermit]

Not maintaining the same level of physical premises, the employer's balance sheet benefits. What of the worker?

Saves travel time and costs.

[JimC]

Not maintaining the same level of physical premises, the employer's balance sheet benefits. What of the worker?

Saves travel time and costs.

Absolutely. Our son David had quite a long commute by car, the working from home thing saved him a lot of petrol money, well over an hour a day of boring travel and Melbourne's air from X amount of pollution. He's hoping to continue that in future for about half the time...

[pErvinalia]

What kind of work from home are you imagining here?

Anything. All work in the civilised world has safety standards. Those standards are there to protect the worker.

[Sean Hayden]

You're still entitled to workers comp if you bust your ass in your kitchen during lunch.

[JimC]

Clare, David's partner, was given an allowance by her employer (a state government department) towards setting up a home office space...

[pErvinalia]

You're still entitled to workers comp if you bust your ass in your kitchen during lunch.

The point is to avoid workers comp.

[Brian Peacock]

There's no reason why working from home employment can't be unionised.

I know people who do admin jobs in the health service and they were exploited in the office far more than they have been working from home during lockdown - mainly because they're no longer exposed to things like institutional systems which encourage managerial bullying, the micro management and/or ad-hoc reassignment of tasks, pointless performance metrics collecting, and extra-mural obligations to work through breaks or stay back for meetings to 'get it done by Tuesday' etc. One person I know who manages a number of departments across multiple sites has said that their immediate manager -- one level below the board -- has basically left them alone to prioritise the work that really needs doing without the usual obligation to constantly pass minutia up the managerial food chain or having some board-appointed consultant with a bullshit job title popping into the office every couple of days with a totally new idea about how to re-invent the wheel.

The point I was making about The Economist article is that it kind of assumes that these tiers of managerial 'bullshit jobs' aren't exactly the one's which are unproductive and ripe for replacement by AI and that the 'labour market' of real, productive, non-managerial jobs needs to be subject to the corrective forces of the market in a post-pandemic world. AI isn't going to cook your dinner, empty your bins, scrape fat burgers off the inside of sewage pipes, reset your son's broken arm, or lift your granny out of the bath is it? Capitalism requires a surplus pool of labour and at the moment a lot of those bullshit office jobs look increasingly like they're going to be the one's populating that pool. Perhaps?

[pErvinalia]

There's no doubt that working from home comes with a collection of positives. But we can't dismiss the negatives.

[Brian Peacock]

What do you see as the main negatives?