Trump and Musk have decreed that the remote work option that became popular during the Covid pandemic is not a good thing because people are not doing much work at home. Hence they have demanded that everyone return to the office full-time. Trump encourages this belief by attacking federal workers as lazy and that the remote work option enables them to goof off.
A White House official said 65,000 workers have signed up to leave their jobs while being paid until Sept. 30. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt described federal employees who have been working remotely as lazy, saying “they don’t want to come into the office” and “if they want to rip the American people off, then they’re welcome to take this buyout.”
A federal worker in Colorado, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said the insults directed at the government workforce by members of the Trump administration have been demoralizing for those who provide public services.
Some federal employees are quitting.
Another worker in the Pacific Northwest decided to take the offer on Thursday, even after the judge’s decision. She hopes to use the opportunity to move overseas. But even if the money never comes, she still wants out. She’s unwilling to comply with administration policies such as eliminating diversity initiatives, and she worries that the situation will only get worse for people who stay.
The worker said she opened her laptop, sent her resignation email, and closed it again.
There is an interesting myth about white collar workers, that when they are in the office they are working for all eight hours each day. In reality, nobody can work like that, in the office or at home. People need breaks. In the office, people spend time chatting to co-workers, going to the break room for coffee, day-dreaming at their desks or at meetings, and so on. It is not goofing off unless carried to excess. It is the way that their brains get down time. It is not unlike people doing manual labor who also need breaks to recharge their muscles. When they are at home, they may use the breaks to snack or do minor chores around the house. Not having to commute back and forth (for some it takes more than an hour each way) is also a huge plus, since it does not drain energy and waste time.
If people are really not doing work at home, that means that their work has not been designed well and their output is not well-formulated or being monitored properly. That is a system fault, not a fault of the workers, because the system is not able to distinguish between those who work and those who don’t. It is ironic that when in the age of computers and the internet which are perfectly designed to allow for remote work, we are going back to a Dickensian factory work model.
It is similar to college classrooms. Some faculty are strict about attendance, making sure that students come to class and levying penalties if they do not. This is based on the belief that ‘seat time’, just being in class, somehow leads to learning, through some kind of osmosis. Such faculty also monitor what students are doing in class and if they find students doing something else, they get angry.
I did not see the point of this because I feel that you cannot force people to learn. You can force people to do specific, concrete things (come to class, sit there quietly, hand in homework, and so on) but students who are not interested can and will find ways to not pay attention to you. I used to teach classes ranging from 20 to over 200 and never took attendance. If a student could learn the material without coming to class, that was fine by me. My teaching attempts were focused on making the class worth attending by making it stimulating and interesting and (at the risk of boasting) my classes were very well attended. I was gratified when once a student came up to me towards the end of a semester and said that he had decided (for family reasons) to drop out of college a month earlier but kept coming to my class anyway because he found them interesting.
Was it the case that some of my students did not work as much as they should, just like some workers are not putting in a full amount of work? Of course. But I decided that if I put in strict measures to control such people, two things would happen. (1) Those students would not learn much more anyway because, as I said, you cannot force people to learn. (2) It would make the learning experience much less enjoyable for those students who did not need to be coerced. So it was a losing proposition. I wanted to avoid the tempting trap of creating an authoritarian classroom. (See my published article on that topic here.)
I think that Musk and Trump are going to discover this for themselves. There is no conclusive evidence that working from home greatly reduces productivity, and when it did find lower productivity, it was found to be small. Forcing people to come to the office every day after they have got used to working from home is going to create a more disgruntled workforce. If they think that this policy is going to give good results, they are delusional.
But I do not think that these two are really trying to create a well-functioning government. They are on a major power trip and they want government workers to live in a state of fear and uncertainty.
It’s monocle and top hat behavior. Anybody who wasn’t born rich is a lazy bum that must be kept in line with a whip or cattle prod. The reality of it is self-evident, in the face of any contrary evidence, why even listen to the mendicants? Sure, remote workers usually have fully surveilled work computers and measurable output that would be measured the same way regardless of where the work physically happened. Make them hop to! Make them grateful we allow them the privilege of polishing our shoes.
Also, nevermind that having physical work facilities costs taxpayers literally millions and millions more dollars than remote work, limits the work pool, and makes the jobs fail to compete with similar work for private businesses and local government.
I imagine Trump is the sort of manager who can’t evaluate if his employees are working except by stopping by their desks and seeing them look busy when Trump is looking over their shoulder. He probably also likes abusing the power differential, forcing employees to play friendly while Trump talks about whatever pointless story he wants too. Not to mention the more direct abuse he has levied against female employees.
Musk however strikes me as the sort that is using it as a semi-disguised layoff plan. It likely saves the government money and gives them fewer options for lawsuits if the government employees quit.
I can’t work in an office for disability reasons, but the disability in no way interferes with my ability to poke databases or do other parts of my work. Of course to a lot of that sort losing a disabled trans employee would probably be considered a plus. They can hire another generic white dude
This reminds me of a time pre-work from home when a former boss complained that there weren’t enough people in the office at 9am on a Friday. A bunch of the team worked part time, I started at 10am (because fuck mornings), so of course it was empty. Why did she care? She saw all our work anyway. Which gets us back to Bébé Mélange’s comment at 1
I find it hilarious that two people (and I use that term very loosely), born with platinum spoons in their mouths, who have never performed an honest day’s labor in their lives, think they can tell just from their own hallucinations who is working hard and who isn’t.
I apologize if this seems offensive. It’s not meant to be. But the whole debate of work from home vs return to office is pointless. It’s a distraction by dishonest people who don’t care about it anyway. This particular debate almost always happens on these terms.
I have done a lot of work through staffing companies in the last 15 years and the vast majority of it could be done remotely. But I’ve done a lot of it in the office because I’ve had bosses who at the very least like to look out over an office floor and see all the people they’re in charge of. And in the worst cases, it’s easier for a boss to micromanage you if they see you constantly as a visual reminder that you’re there and what you’re doing.
In other words, I’m supposed to pay for a commute with time and money while the company pays extra to have and maintain a space for me to fill. All so my boss can continue to have a lack of vision and a focus on petty concerns.
Who do you think is really being lazy here?
The is a major crisis brewing in commercial real estate. There’s an absolutely enormous amount of money borrowed against property based on pre-pandemic valuations -- enough to cause a major banking crisis if and when people ever have to admit just how bad their loan books are. Lenders have been rolling loans over rather than have to mark them down, but that can’t go on forever… When it all unwinds, it could make 2008 look like a picnic.
U.S. Commercial Real Estate Is Headed Toward a Crisis
(There are similar issues in the UK, Europe, and probably most other developed markets.)
Which is not too say that a lot of the return-to-the-office pressure isn’t coming from bad managers, but there are solid commercial reasons for a lot of investors to want people back in their offices. There’s an awful lot of capital tied up in office blocks and the associated infrastructure.
Power-hungry sadism 101:
For those who crave power, having power feels good really only if they can make others hurt.
What good does it do their feelings, if the peons work well. They might be enjoying it. No, to make sure that they do it because those in power make them, the peons must hurt.
dunc @7 -- good point, which would make this yet another move by corrupt politicians to use taxpayer money as welfare to the wealthy. tvxnp the realtor stay afloat when tvxnp the dictator spends more tax dollars on office space.
dunc @7:
I understand the point but I don’t think it’s a good one. More people in the office doesn’t help a company that’s going to default on a mortgage stop defaulting on a mortgage.
Frankly the article lost me when they said wages were going up due to less labor and more demand. That’s absurd. Wages should have gone up but didn’t in any significant, widespread way. Those at the top simply screwed us over harder and what increases we got seem roughly in line with the usual increases.
Dunc @ # 7: There’s an absolutely enormous amount of money borrowed against property based on pre-pandemic valuations … there are solid commercial reasons for a lot of investors to want people back in their offices.
And guess who has already announced plans to swing a wrecking ball at that office-tower-of-cards?
Pierce, @ #11: So they want everybody back in the office, but they also want to get rid of the offices? “I’m not sure they’ve thought this fully through” indeed…
lanir, @ #10
It’s not the companies that use the offices that have the mortgages on them. Almost all office space is leased. The problem is that businesses are no longer leasing as much office space, so there are a lot of vacancies, which pushes down lease rates. The affordability of the mortgage is based on how much you can lease the space for.
Fewer people in the office also means fewer people popping out for coffee, or buying lunch, or all of the other economic activity that comes from having lots of people in central business districts -- so the businesses that used to serve them also go out of business, leaving their properties vacant, further eroding rents.
Well, I admit that I’m a lot more productive when I’m at the office than when I’m working from home. I don’t know whether it is because I have more distractions at home, or I’m less focused, or that after 35 years of working at an office I’m just more used to it. We’ve been on a 3-days at the office, 2-days working from home for a couple years now and I get almost all of my work done when I’m in the office. Just don’t tell my boss. Even this schedule has allowed the company I work for to shutter two of the five buildings on the campus.
I have four reports. One of them works well from home, one does not, and the last two are in a different country and different time zone. I don’t know how well they work from home or from the office, I just know that they complete the assignments I give them.
Maybe we are heading back toward a time where most people work from home and there are local, and walkable to, coffee shops, grocery stores, diners, barbers/salons, etc. It would mean some re-thinking of zoning laws, but there isn’t a reason why 10% of houses in a subdivision couldn’t be knocked down and small businesses allowed into those spaces. It would also mean overcoming the fight against this that speculative developers, homeowner’s associations, and franchise restaurants would put up. Could you imagine working from home and then popping out for a half hour to walk over to get a sandwich and a cup of coffee? It’s not really possible in the US aside from a few large cities. I’ve seen some retirement communities planned this way, why not subdivisions?