Yet more "please return to the office" pseudo-journalism bollocks.
Front-line staff have to clock on, get their toilet breaks timed, get drug tested, have weird random shift patterns, have to work at least one day on the weekend, have to cover for colleagues by doing a 16-hour shift, get paid overtime, can't nip out for a doctor's appointment, etc, etc, etc.
Happy for bosses to consider making the workplace more equal, but let's start by making front-line staff's lives easier rather than making everyone else's lives harder.
I don’t know which part of that article you read, but the main takeaways were to have front line workers have a better quality of work. Have managers onsite more, increase pay for frontline workers to compensate for not being able to commute, and shift to four day weeks instead of five to reduce commute.
I agree that flexibility such as doctors appointments are important, and also that can be difficult if you’re one of two employees working a storefront, particularly if it’s busy. Heading out to an unplanned appointment (what I assume you mean by “nip out”) may be difficult, but accommodating planned and scheduled appointments could certainly be made easier - this is a time when the onsite manager should say “I will be in that day and I will cover for the time needed for your appointment”.
> Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce.
This from the article. My point is that this is absolute bullshit. Front-line staff already have massive inequality of working standards, and have done for decades.
The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive to equalise workplace differences. It's driven by an entire class of asset for the very wealthy becoming almost worthless.
I will agree that that particular part of the write up is suspect, who exactly said this beyond those nameless “business leaders” that are just now realizing remote work is a thing? I wouldn’t argue that frontline workers haven’t harbored some resentment to remote coworkers as remote work got more widespread, the framing of it being a new thing seems disingenuous.
The overall takeaway I got is that the better approach is to bring better value to the frontline workers to make up for the discrepancies in “fairness” - honestly, this should have been the thinking from the on-set.
> The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive to equalise workplace differences. It's driven by an entire class of asset for the very wealthy becoming almost worthless.
I didn’t see anything suggesting this as a remedy in TFA, though I’ll go read it again in a bit. Completely agree that the only reasonable defense of any push to end work from home is to make up for real estate investment
> The overall takeaway I got is that the better approach is to bring better value to the frontline workers to make up for the discrepancies in “fairness” - honestly, this should have been the thinking from the on-set.
Exactly. Things weren't fair back in 2019, but no-one cared back then because it was just front-line workers.
Like you, I'd applaud any effort to improve conditions for front-line workers. But that's not the motivation here, and I very much doubt that WFH policies would be the first thing that front-line workers would suggest to improve their lives.
The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t.
Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstreet traders? There would be a nation wide solidarity strike.
Bill Gates famously joked in the 90s that Microsoft would lose a third of their engineers instantly if they drug tested. The NSA even had to make an official exception on past drug use so people would stop failing the security screening (although they still get tested iirc).
How many bad economic decisions were based on cocaine usage back in the day? I think the point is that with higher paying and salaried jobs you are practically exempt from having repercussions due to drug usage while a lowerpaid wage worker is constantly in fear of getting fired over it.
Has there actually been any hard evidence to support this idea? I know there's a fair bit to support Hitler being basically a junkie by the end of the war, but pre-war I'm pretty sure he was just a meglomaniacal psychopath.
How many people regularly die because your grocery store cashier smokes weed after their shift?
How many people could be hurt by a drunk pilot, and how many could be hurt by working at a Walmart while high?
The point is that we test where there is no reasonable danger at all and don't test when there is. Why? We drug test poor people and not wealthy people.
My daughter worked at Publix and was only drug tested at time of employment. Just like I did when I got my engineering job. I heard Publix does random drug testing, not sure.
Walmart is the same.
“ After pilots and flight attendants have been hired, they are subject to random drug screenings. Federal regulation detail the percentage of the total employees who should be subject to random testing in a given year, and this figure is usually around 50% and varies by the positive test rate from previous data. As drug testing is random, flight and ramp crew don't know when these tests will occur. Pilots and flight attendants who are randomly selected for drug screenings will often be met on the jet bridge after passengers have deplaned. An official holding a clipboard is usually the sign of an upcoming random drug screening.” - https://simpleflying.com/pilot-drug-test-frequency-guide/
Based on likely social setting difference due to salary difference plus the fact that truck drivers go through seedy places and do many long stretches alone, compared to pilots frequenting airports and hotels, and always working with a crew, I'm sure truck drivers use more drugs than airplane pilots. If you are not sure of this, I think your mind is "too open".
I think a better way to put it is that commercial aircraft personnel are under strict legal time limits while the legal time limits on truckers are not enforced particularly strongly and the trucking companies provide incentives not to follow those rules. So truck drivers are incented to take stimulants to a degree pilots are not.
“To a degree” means some pilots will still stay up late and try to use stimulants to stay awake. But the pressure on the two cohorts is not equivalent.
This comment betrays the old and persistent idea that lower status people are inherently shifty and lazy, while higher status people are inherently more virtuous.
Let’s say for argument’s sake that truck drivers proportionally engage in more risky behavior. This can be either the use of stimulants or simply driving tired. Why is that?
Drivers’ — like many low status workers — jobs security is more precarious and are monitored more. Therefore, they’re more likely to engage in risky behavior in a desire to simply not be fired.
Now let’s get back to pilots. Is it just that airline pilots are a high status job like ceo? Not entirely. Pilots are essentially no different than truck drivers in the sky. Ironically, it’s because planes themselves are tracked by a competent and vigorous government agency, that employers can’t put the same pressures on pilots that they can on truck drivers.
This comment betrays the old and persistent idea that lower status people are inherently shifty and lazy, while higher status people are inherently more virtuous.
I think this is because people are applying survivorship bias. It's really difficult to make it to those status levels while abusing drugs and alcohol. And even if you party hard at the top you must be able to "handle your shit".
Success at the top is a careful dance of social nuance. If you fly to an on-site, get drunk in the hotel bar, and are late to the meeting or smell like booze, you're social status will be impacted unless you're a wizard with social excuses or make up for it in some other way.
So--in a way--the success is the greatest drug test.
I don't know much about this history of (e.g.) Wall Street. But for Washington, DC, I can think of a lot of people who made it pretty far up the ladder before booze caught up with them. Wilbur Mill was head of the House Ways and Means Committee. Sumner Welles was Under Secretary of State. Mendel Rivers was head of the House Armed Services Committee.
It’s not just that. It has puritan religous undertones. Work is virtuous, and god rewards those that have his favor. Therefore those that have less, are obviously outside of god’s favor. Why are they not rewarded? Because they aren’t virtuous, and since work is virtue, they must be shifty and lazy.
This is very deep seated idea in American culture. It manifests all sorts of ways. Deference to the rich, because clearly every rich person got and stayed rich through hard work and skill, instead of luck and family connections. Harsher penalities for poor people crimes, rather than rich people crimes. Constant monitoring for low wage workers, but no monitoring of high wage ones. Egregious hoops and monitoring for welfare, versus tax credits. Hell, even modern evangelical grifters leverage this idea with their prosperity gospel lies.
How rich are we talking? I'm just talking about your average schmuck pulling in $120k in a white collar job. Very unlikely that these types are leveraging family connections. It just takes a four year degree, washing your car, and being able to host some coworkers for lunch.
Disclaimer: I believe it's society's duty to shame the shifless and lazy.
And most of the behaviors that are taught by religions are rooted in anecdotal evidence over hundreds of years. Harder workers usually succeed more than the lazy. It's a lot more effective to say "hard work = heaven".
And it's not even really about "success". Giving a damn about what you do in this life is key to a life of happiness and therefore a life aimed at a target and governed by rules about how to interact with your fellow man. "Giving a damn" is the most important foundation for financial success as well.
> idea that lower status people are inherently shifty and lazy, while higher status people are inherently more virtuous
It's not about that. But also statistically on average that idea is accurate in this case at least. The qualifications and self-discipline required to become a pilot are significantly higher than for a driver. Your also surrounded by many other people all the time so it's much harder to not get noticed. Also AFAIK random testing for alcohol is certainly a thing for pilots.
> that employers can’t put the same pressures on pilots
One might argue that they would more or less end up doing the same on their own. The cost/risk ratio is extremely different compared to truck drivers. Also costs of having extra pilots/allowing them to work less are not that significant relative to road transportation.
> How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs?
This is an interesting question but not all drugs decrease performance. For instance, if a pilot responsibly takes some wakey meds before landing a long haul flight it may be a good thing. There’s a reason for the “I can’t function before the morning coffee” expression.
I remember a documentary many years ago about long haul pilots who went partying HARD the day before flying back from Bangkok, Tokyo or places like that. They wouldn’t have been allowed to drive, but flew hundreds of passengers. It was filmed undercover, but I don’t remember if there was a backlash/consequences.
i recently met someone who stopped drinking coffee and after a while realized that the only reason he could not function without having a coffee before was that he must have been addicted to it. once he got off that addiction the problem went away.
the only reason that stops me from functioning in the morning is lack of sleep.
I was never "can't function" level, but stopping caffeine did open my eyes to how much of a fog I was in until the caffeine was dripped in. After a month or so of no caffeine I started realizing I could just wake up and feel instantly as alert as I normally would an hour or so into my day when taking caffeine.
But ultimately it comes down to sleep. Caffeine just masked sleep problems. If I don't sleep well, I still crave it. If I sleep well, I don't think about it anymore.
> There’s a reason for the “I can’t function before the morning coffee” expression.
Yeah, a lot of people tend to be later-risers. The realities of the 9-5 job mean that they have to get up at 6-7 to get the kids ready for school, then get themselves ready for work, and then the commute to work... despite that going completely against their chronotype.
The plane did crash. There was one fatality. That is because the pilot was skilled.
Unfortunately the pilot was also drunk. And he tried to shift the blame of the vodka bottle to the deceased person. There is no amount of technical skill that should permit someone like that behind a stick ever again.
Otherwise, you'd see productivity being better in places that allow drug testing of normal employees and worse off in places that do not. But that's not the case: Retail employees in Norway aren't really less productive than those in the US.
Plus, if it really were a productivity measure, why would you not drug test more professionals and salaried employees? Does their productivity not matter? Wouldn't more small businesses find drug testing worth the money?
To any extent that a truck driver misses a pickup or fails to report due to alcohol or subsequent effects, yes, that truck that isn’t moving at all is moving slower than one that’s loaded, crewed, and rolling.
Nearly every NTSB report of a major accident has a post-mortem analysis for alcohol and other drugs. (When it’s missing, it’s usually because no body was recovered.)
Every crew involved in a commercial aviation mishap knows they’ll be tested as well.
There may be no way to get an answer with 6 significant figures, but you can get a pretty good answer.
Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad. Half of silicon valley allegedly is micro-dosing all sorts of things and apparently benefiting from that. Steve Jobs famously advocated using LSD. The Vietnam war famously had a lot of drug abuse. WW II soldiers and leadership were consuming epic amounts of amphetamines. And that wasn't just the Nazis.
Companies aren't testing for this because they couldn't care less. Drugs isn't killing their business and they like having access to smart people who might fail a test. The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs. Also with drugs being illegal, using them necessarily means breaking the law and interacting with criminals. Which looks bad politically as well.
Remote work is different. People and companies disagree about the effects but a lot of companies seem to prefer having their people not work remotely. Not because of the way it looks but because of at least the perception of its impact on productivity. Whether you agree with that or not doesn't matter. Some people are concerned about it and acting accordingly.
The inequality here relates mainly to the value of the work people do. Just like companies don't like losing access to people who are smart and may use drugs, they also don't like losing access to people who have valuable skills that insist on working remotely. So they allow some people to work remotely. But of course some skills are more valuable than others so the inequality mainly relates to how easy it is to replace people with more compliant ones.
They test warehouse workers because their insurance demands it. Personal injury settlements are expensive and drugs increase the risk. If employers cannot show that they are taking efforts to discourage it then they could end up being held liable (and the insurance not covering it).
obviously it is the belief of upper management that low level workers cannot be trusted to behave and work to their maximum if they're on drugs, while the "elites" require such drugs to reach their maximum potential.
Low level workers have the highest chance of getting injured while operating heavy machinery -> highest chance of being drug tested by the police in such cases -> the management would rather spend money on drug testing than on the lawyers later on.
High-paid workers have a pretty small risk of injury -> very small risk of the government testing them -> management is not incentivized to spend money on drug testing (and possible hiring costs later on).
It's actually the same reasoning as with remote work. Lower level employees are easier to replace. So they can be more strict on those. And drugs and certain equipment can create dangerous situations. Where dangerous here means "has the potential to create expensive liability related lawsuits". Which is of course something companies do care about. This is less of an issue with office workers and creatives.
No its because usually low level jobs require you to operate heavy machinery like driving a truck or operating a forklift or work on the floor of the factory, or being around those things. Or for example handling cash at registers etc. I feel like this conspiracy is the author, and apparently hn needs to touch grass a little bit
Seriously. I was drug tested when I worked at the shipyard. Not in my current job in tech. That doesn't bother me in the least, because I had hundreds more ways to accidentally kill either myself or a coworker when I was welding 100' up on the side of a ship than if I hazily mis-click a dialogue box now. No one complained about it at the shipyard, either, because we didn't want to get killed by a high idiot.
A friend from Yugoslavia told me about his job there. Their lunch room looked like a grand cafe with every possible kind of liquor and a variety of beer on the tap. Around 11 am some of his coworkers had a few beers, in the sun, in front of the building. Around 1 they had some whiskey or vodka etc. At the end of the work day some went home, others stuck around. They had a few more drinks, some went home, others went out to eat together, some went home after dinner, some went back to the office. He regularly got very drunk. Sometimes he would make a row of chairs and sleep there. 7 am his boss would be the first to arrive. He was always happy to see someone was already there and made coffee. They sat around and chatted some more and he would start his shift an hour early (not paid ofc)
It wasn't that everyone got drunk at work every day, some more often than others, some rarely which made it kind of a special occasion if they stuck around.
He had the same assignments as his coworkers but completed them in half the time. Sometimes, at 11 am, he would just continue drinking beer while sitting in the sun and go home an hour early.
The funniest part was that they mostly talked about work. It was one lengthy extended meeting till 1 am, if they had some kind of deadline they would just work in their spare time while drinking (without pay)
No culture is strange until compared. I drink 2 liters of coffee, smoke a lot and consume lots of sugar. This is perfectly normal here.
When I was an engineer in the offshore drilling business in the early 80s, when we were in the office (not on a rig or in a shipyard), it was very common to call up a vendor to take us out for lunch and a couple beers. Usually that was it but there were days we took the afternoon off.
Alcohol at lunch in a business setting was much more widespread at the time.
If you are lifting heavy boxes in the warehouse and you are on drugs, you can physically harm someone. There is no way to directly correlate using drugs and performance of an engineer, for all we know, small infrequent drug use improves performance ( not talking about abusing drugs heavily)
> The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs.
I always thought companies that do drug testing got some kind of discount on their own insurance rates for it.
The way I had it explained to me in the 90s was while drug use was disqualifying for things like the FBI, for the NSA it was fine-ish provided you were open about it.
I have had personal conversations with people who went through involved security clearance processes in the 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. Between those times I can tell you that everyone but the FBI got more lax about pot (but not cocaine) and homosexuality (even the FBI didn't care about that by the mid 2000's) but not more lax about gambling - even in states where it was already legal. They aren't on the lookout for straight arrows to hire, they're on the lookout for people who can be blackmailed to steal information. Once things like simple weed possession became nothing more than a small civil penalty, there wasn't any way to use the threat of exposure as a way of blackmailing someone. Once people knew they couldn't generally be fired / blackballed for homosexuality, that lever disappeared.
Sounds like a circular argument. The FBI fires gay people, so they had to fire them to prevent them from leaking information because of possible blackmail. But once they stopped firing them for homosexuality there was no need to fire them because of fear they might be blackmailed because of the possibility to fire them. It's probably true for gambling, but the rest sounds like whitewashing. They fired gay people because society was hostile towards them and those agencies were part of society.
I think the assumption you're missing in the circular argument is that gay people could be blackmailed against other entities than the FBI. For example, "give us this FBI file or else we'll release a scandalous photo of you and this gentleman to your wife" kind of a thing.
Of course, as being gay becomes more normalized and less of a secret, FBI wouldn't need to take it into consideration.
How true or not that thinking is, I have no way of assessing, but it does make sense if you consider the premise of blackmail to 3rd parties true. The same could be probably considered for gambling (e.g. "we'll tell your local church group how much you gambled away in your drunken stupor on this weekend").
I don't know how the federal government works but I am positive that in the private sector evidence of extramarital affairs can cause your clearance application to be rejected.
Anecdata: allegedly, confessing an extramarital affair (past or ongoing) during your Department of Defense Secret (relatively common level clearance) examination or renewal will result in an offer to speak with your spouse in a few days to ensure that you’ve told them. An unadmitted affair would set off far more alarm bells.
I was a carefree recent college grad and sheepishly admitted to smoking weed a couple of times, having been assured by older friends that admitting to some past experimentation was a lot better than hiding it. “Is there anyone you don’t want to find out about this?” was the agent’s response.
“Nah, my parents know…”
Later, a friend who had assiduously avoided even being around weed took ages to get his clearance. We theorized that the holdup was DIA being suspicious that he didn’t admit to such minor drug use, and wondered what else he might be hiding.
Habitual gambling still gets the side-eye for the same reason general financial problems do: higher susceptibility to the temptation of a few thousand dollars to let something slip or to look the other way.
They are. Political parties do something similar before putting you on a ticket: they require you to declare any dirt on yourself that could possibly be revealed at a later date, even if only one other person in the world knows about it. Then they assess the risk of each secret, and maybe decide it's okay. But if they manage to dig up anything that you didn't declare, you're out.
They are doing that now. I’ve had to be a reference for several people seeking security clearances and I believe every one of those interviews asked me if I thought the subject was faithful in their relationship.
Gambling is seen as a liability because gamblers often get into huge amounts of debt, which is what the FBI is really concerned about. Huge amounts of debt open people up to bribes and other corruption.
Exactly. Even in places where it was legal it was an easy way to get on the radar of organized crime, who would try to exert influence. It also could be an indicator of an affinity for risk-taking. And if there's anything they're trying to avoid in high level secret keeping... It's risk.
This isn’t code executing in a computer. It is about prevailing societal attitudes (which are themselves self-referential and self-reinforcing) so it is necessarily kind of imprecise and circular.
Yes, it was a completely circular argument. I am 100% not defending it. But you're completely correct that all they had to do to keep someone from being blackmailed because otherwise they'd be fired was... to not fire them.
I'm sure there's a lot of moral-highgrounding about everyone outside the group being untrustworthy, and looking for confirmation of this in the most paranoid ways.
Could it simply be data driven? Is there any truth that the jobs that drug test most often are or were more likely to have drug related incidents than the others? I don’t know the data but my guess would be it is based on past performance as a whole more than individual impact.
Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made
If it were at all data driven everyone would test for alcohol. That usually doesn’t happen unless there’s an accident and even then, a doctor wouldn’t be subject to a blood test or breathalyzer like a driver would. They’d just be allowed to go home and the matter would be handled in litigation and before the medical board.
Some companies require it for everyone. When I did consulting work for Home Depot, I was required to get a drug test. It didn't matter that I wasn't a W2 nor a 1099 for them but a W2 of a consulting company who HD hired to do a project for them, all of us had to be drug tested, with the reason being that Home Depot didn't think it was fair to test people working in their stores if the white collar people weren't tested too. My employer didn't require the test of anyone but since this was a big contract, as far as I know, no one refused. If I were a recreational drug user, it might have been a rather unwelcome situation to come up after years of working for the company where drug use outside of the office wasn't a concern.
So everybody needs to be miserable as if you are not miserable the rest of miserable people will look at you and say: That's not fair!! I am miserable so you must be miserable too!
Of all the "arguments" used by hired Public Relations companies hired to spin "work from home" in a bad light, this is the most stupid argument I have ever heard.
This makes me uncomfortable as probably because of that it could be the most successful.
The article doesn’t recommend forcing more people to come into the office, so your comment reflects experiences outside of this article, not what they’re saying.
> So everybody needs to be miserable as if you are not miserable the rest of miserable people will look at you and say: That's not fair!! I am miserable so you must be miserable too!
This argument gets used a lot in politics, whenever a situation is to be improved people claim "but we suffered, that's not fair!!!".
Personally, I know this from fellow second-generation migrants here in Germany that are opposed to how "easy" refugees have it - their claim is that they had to fight German bureaucracy for years until they were allowed to work and whatnot. Which is valid, yes, but they seem to be unaware that times have changed.
Crab mentality is dangerous. It seems like a lot of people would rather pull others down to where they are than allow everyone to be lifted up to somewhere better.
The issue seems to be that many people don't consider their situation in absolute terms, but tend to look at how others have it.
An interesting book on the subject is Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (original German title: Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft) by Helmut Schoeck.
That book is incredibly relevant to current trends. While envy in small societies spurred improvement, in today’s complex societies it breeds destructive tendencies, vast disparity in achievement makes envy less about motivation and more about resentment, fueling calls for collectivism and redistribution. The rise of Progressive politics might be less about fairness and more about an unaddressed, deep-seated envy. We know historically there are only destructive outcomes for policies rooted in such emotions, rather than constructive societal development.
Envy is who has a problem with Inequality.
Charity is who has a problem with poverty.
Easiest way to reduce inequality is kneecap those at the top and share the lucre with your downtrodden political allies.
Easiest way to help poverty is teaching a man to fish after giving him a couple fish so he doesn't need to worry about starvation during class.
That's the idea anyway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality) but honestly I haven't observed nearly enough crabs in buckets to say with confidence that it's typical for the species. It's entirely possible that a few asshole crabs have given them all a bad reputation and that I'm just perpetuating an unfair stereotype.
If I get the chance to get to know more bucket crabs I'm perfectly willing to change my view of them if turns out that they're largely cooperative and helpful.
The same inequality between c level and frontline workers exists on so many levels with other perks is it possible that the c level just don’t want to lose its privileges? In Europe as a manager you get subsidized cars where the company pays for gas, private corner offices, equity or special bonus programs not always are benefits packages available for frontline workers… and now they talk about inequality if more staff could have perks like wfh, there always was a divide between staff that needs to be on site and other, only other staff also starts to get some perks in the form of wfh… why don’t give the frontline workers a company car, a private rest zone and better amenities or cash?
I think that this is partly because in Europe taxation is progressive and it quickly becomes quite high. (In the UK £100k-£120k is effectively taxed at 60%+ more if you have young kids)
So there is a point where giving someone 10k take home pay rise costs the business much more than giving a frontline worker a 10k take home pay rise.
But an EV car in the UK is taxed 98% less than the same amount in cash.
Rest zones, work from home etc have 0 tax implications .
Arguably lower paid staff is better off getting the cash instead of the benefits and using it as they see fit
True! For people with children there is also an effective tax due in the 50k to 60k band because the child benefit gets paid back, and the for the people with young children close to the 100k taxable income the loss of the 30 hour free childcare and the tax free childcare can cause (in expensive places like London) a drop of disposable income of up to about 8k when you declare the pound that moves you from 99,999.00 to 100k.
Under those conditions tax free benefits like working from home (convenience and not having to pay expensive train tickets) can be a nice topping to a modest salary increase when moving jobs.
The kid tax is at 50k, if you have student loans and 2 kids the marginal tax at 50-60k is 69%, then back to 42% for 60-100, then upto 62% 100-125, then 40% upto 150, then 45% above that.
Yes but an EV car is treated as a 2% benefit in kind.
E.g. (simplifying) your employer can buy you a 40k Tesla and you get taxed as if they gave you 2% of that as salary. In the 40% braket that is £800 benefit in kind so you pay 320 extra tax.
interesting, as far as i remember, in germany any benefits towards employees are treated as income and taxed accordingly or even worse, to the point that it is better to pay out benefits in cash only. i think this comes from companies trying to save on taxes by taking advantage of benefits that previously were taxed differently (or not at all)
jep, it gets treated as "gedldwerter vorteil", so it affects your taxable income/social security tax, but depending on the car (E or ICE) and the way you deduct it (driving log, 1% rule, etc...) it can be worth it
At the core of it, this is the reason we're now seeing the RTO push. Execs don't want peons to share their privileges. They were fine with it during lockdown because got to keep making money. But now, back to the field, serfs!
The amount of effort to make inequality a fight between a white collar worker making 100,000 and a blue collar working making 30-40,000 and not about a CEO making 10Million or an investor making 100 million is clear and insidious.
I don't think those are the kinds of jobs that have workers that expect to work from home. If you deal with physical assets, machinery, direct-customer communication, etc, you probably don't expect to be able to do your job outside of your company-assigned post anyway.
On the other hand, anybody that works in a cubical and mostly deals with a phone/computer could probably easily expect that they would be able to work from home. Many of those jobs have fairly modest pay. And I think if you have that aspiration to work from home, you would probably still be a little annoyed about the inability to work from home, regardless of the pay. But I agree there is likely a price where one would be fine with letting that dream stay a dream.
I feel that the far greater problem is that employers are now painting this neat picture where it's employees vs employees in this dilemma over inequality. Foreshadowing that it may be something they need to bother to step in the middle of in the near future. When in reality we are fairly united against employers in their seeming lack of willingness to just treat all of their employees well. Speaking generally of course.
I for some reason think about these things a lot, even though I guess I'm not in the front line anymore and have it pretty nice.
I can remember in 2010 or so having two friends who worked from home - one doing generic helpdesk in a small apartment, and one doing medical coding in a trailer. Neither paid well at all, and never did I get this sense of jealousy. Perhaps their lives were easier because of it, but it was far from the giant sun lit home offices people seem to imagine.
I also think a lot about how retail has changed. As a child, you had actual sales people in a lot of places who seemed happy to help. Probably on commission. Even the non-commissioned jobs people didn't seem so miserable. Probably because the wage gap wasn't as huge as it is today. So many people I encounter seem bothered by my presence and genuinely miserable, I try to avoid even going to stores anymore. It's a lose lose lose situation.
Of course, I have no answers for any of this, just observations from a middling age man.
On the service front I think what you’ve witnessed is work culture evolution. If you think about retail and food service, people churn in and out fast. The culture evolves quicker than you’d normally expect because of the people changing and many adaptations to new management, policies, technologies, etc. It’s become common place for workers to just not be present at all in these settings. Nobody to ask where to find something and certainly nobody trustworthy enough to ask about a products features/ or for a recommendation. The employees on the floor are likely preoccupied by something else like stocking shelves and it’s as if you’re interrupting them to ask as any question. So new employees come on board and they’re never taught how to help customers. Then they get promoted and maybe they know the POS the best but they can’t deal with customers well. They’re responsible for hiring and training new hires. So since they don’t value customer service, they don’t mind when new hire wants to wear AirPods while stocking. Now suddenly everyone is wearing AirPods while working. So you literally are interrupting them as a customer. They have to pause their podcast to have you repeat the question you already asked 3 times while trying to get their attention. It’s likely they don’t know how to help you if you really do need help did solving your problem is not their default, they think shrugging and saying I don’t know is acceptable and you’re on your own.
This happens over and over and now a workforce that’s too ambivalent to be productively helpful to customers experiences. Not even proactively in common sense ways. An example I’ve run into a couple time from quick service food joints goes like this. I order a fountain drink with my food. Pay, walk to drink machine that’s out of order. I ask clerk if there’s anything else to drink, they say no. I then ask why they sold me a fountain drink if they know machine is broken? I tell them I want a refund. They say they don’t know how. Takes 15 minutes and a manager to get the refund. As I’m waiting, cashier continues selling fountain drinks to customers in line.
> Neither paid well at all, and never did I get this sense of jealousy.
You might just not be one of these people. For some people, the feeling of being on your way to work is an existential dread. Or like you're leaving your life behind to live a different one that you don't generally enjoy for a while. Some of those people would likely do anything to avoid that feeling. I think for those people, working from home is epic. You get to go to work every day on what feels more like your terms and your life, whatever that life may be. Instead of molding myself into the image of my work environment every day, I can mold my workplace more into myself. Feeding me into:
> but it was far from the giant sun lit home offices people seem to imagine.
For some people, the ideal working conditions are a dimly lit basement, believe it or not.
> [The generally unhappy state of front line workers yesteryear and this one.]
Just 10 years ago, I was working front lines at a Super Target, making 15 cents above my state's minimum wage, which amounted to something like $8.50/hour. I'm in general a fairly.. well "stoic" might be the nicer word.. person, so faking a smile for the sake of a stranger's comfort would have cost me more in energy than my employer was paying me, if that makes sense. That's not to say I'm a jerk to people on purpose, by any means. But if I'm in a bad mood because I left for work at 4:30AM to make barely more than enough for a room to rent, peanut butter sandwiches, and my cell phone bill, it would have been difficult to summon the strength. This is mostly just to say that I agree with your observation, but I empathize more with the employees than the customers who feel they were under-helped.
Observations from someone who will be entering the middling ages soon.
I totally agree with all of this. It used to be that Retail Salesperson was a career you could do until you retire. But now employers really do not pay the sales people enough to care.
"I don't think those are the kinds of jobs that have workers that expect to work from home."
I think especially for forklift drivers and alike - this is about to change. With teleoperating semi autonomous machinery, most of these jobs could be then remote as well. But it will take some time as currently humans and simple forklifts are way cheaper.
That comment may apply to the general topic often, but this article clearly mentions "just pay them more" as a solution. It's really quite a balanced read.
Sure, but I'm positing that pay here is the entire issue (hence forest for the trees) comment. People tend to associate WFH with a cushy job.
You can find a hundred side effects of that - people who want to work in their underpants, not get ready for work, not shower, have a flexible schedule, etc., as individual 'inequalities.' If fixing the pay makes other complaints disappear, were they ever a primary factor?
FWIW, I do think the pendulum will shift in our lifetime. The 'You Call the Handyman' South Park really hit home for us, and I can totally see that now and even more in 20 or so years. Can you imagine needing something fixed in your house and trying to barter your skills? I sure can't!
If fixing the pay makes other complaints disappear, were they ever a primary factor?
i don't think this is the right question.
of course, if i get paid more, i am willing to put up with worse work conditions. (to a degree). so the mere fact that pay makes the problem go away is not an indicator that this was not a real problem.
more pay lets me compensate the problem otherwise. for example it may mean that me or my partner can reduce work hours instead of working from home.
A bit tangential, but as someone who has been responsible for paying many people, I have never seen increased pay improve performance and rarely morale. Promotions have sometimes covered the latter.
What I’ve found is that mostly people work as hard as they care to, and that is mostly orthogonal to compensation and title.
The discussion is pulled by big income of office space owners and builders. Secondly there is shortage of good mid and line management that cannot cope without looking over shoulder due to various reasons.
Any argument to support their profit is good.
I agree. Notably missing from the conversation is the struggling commercial real estate industry and investments that have already been committed into that market.
>>>> Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce.
Working at a multinational, people have had varied work arrangements, perquisites, social hierarchies, and pay scales, for a long time. WFH is just a new wrinkle, where you're one of the "remotes" but you live in the same town for some reason. Also, if you think about it, the network of suppliers, contractors, and customers represent quasi-remotes in the sense that they're also involved in the business but are not locating themselves on site, and are jockeying for advantages just like everybody else.
The remotes are mostly invisible. The winds of self-interest that fill our sails continue to blow even if no other ship is in sight.
I studied at university and chose a programmer path quite indirectly and rather much because the thought of being physically and temporally bound to external and impersonal locations and tools and interactions, for labor, made me nauseous. I worked "remote" also at the office, reclusively, seen somewhat as an alien by colleagues (not unjustly) for whom meeting room bookings were actually critical. I'm not complaining, but it's not all glamour either. You get what you stake out.
I understand the problem, but it feels like this existed for a while and no business manager cared about it until they started losing the RTO battle. This seems like a way to boost that argument without actually caring for the employees.
Are they losing the RTO battle though? Amazon don't seem to be too bothered if you quit rather than go back to the office at the moment - there again Amazon might be just looking to reduce headcount on the cheap too.
There's a glut of office space where I live, something like 35% of new offices are unoccupied, so maybe that's due to over-supply or failing RTO policies?
One of the top stories today on LinkedIn is that CEOs are increasingly waiving the white flag and admitting surrender in the RTO battle. There's work that needs to get done and companies fighting wars against themselves and their employees is a needless distraction. Now it's a race to see who can put an end the self inflicted wounds the fastest and get a leg up on those still fighting themselves.
Maybe Amazon with loads of cheap work and a huge name that still holds a lot of reputation in the tech sector for engineers is not the best example. But a smaller business with their main workforce quitting losing hundreds of thousands of dollar/euro might reconsider.
Most companies are settling for hybrid, and workers not returning are slowly being left behind. Mostly because "classic" companies processes are not ready for remote workers
I will agree to abolish the inequality caused by WfH when CEOs agree to abolish the inequality caused by salary discrepancies (i.e. never). We leave in an inequal society, and for good reasons.
Who wouldn't agree that difficult work should be payed more? Work that requires the acquisition of skills should be payed a bit more too, no? There should be a system in place which determines the appropriate compensation, not arbitrary compensation as determined by the market.
1. I agree that difficult work should be payed more. For example, military service is as difficult as being a CEO (just in a different way), but pays a fraction of CEO's salary.
2. Should job requiring acquisition of skills pay more? Probably, but the discrepancy shouldn't be large. Most high-end jobs require 4 extra years of schooling (and thus forteited income) - whereas the job will be performed for 30-40 years. Thus, in a fair world, high-end jobs would pay around 10% than jobs requiring only high-school diploma.
Right now, the high-skill jobs largely go to children of parents with higher social and financial capital, which are able to roll out a red carpet for their children to the well paying jobs (via being role models on how to land a place in corporate hierarchy, choosing good schools, paying for tutors, encouraging choosing a profitable major in college etc.). Many people in high-end jobs are largely there because of their parents.
What you're describing is communism. And renumeration for workers will be even more arbitrary than market forces, because humans cannot make "a system" that is independent from humans.
Life is built on inequality, but HBR wants to guilt us into all going back to the office out of some sense of equality? What a fucking joke. The only group this benefits are those at the very top. Either that or my commute is included in my working hours. I'll never go back to the office and wasting so much time commuting per week and not being compensated.
Ah, ok... So I suppose since many starve to death for lack of water and food we should do the same. And of course, only workers, executives MUST work as they want.
I think the office PR have almost exhausted all ideas to try pushing people back in the smart city or interment champ for slaves who should not be aware of they status...
My biggest question after reading the article is why did they use a LLM to do what is basically a binary classification task? Why not use a BERT-like standard text classifier?
This is one of the reasons I left Google. I did not like being one of the “exceptions” to remote work. I was anticipating some team dynamic problems going forward.
What nonsense. The divide is not in highly paid vs low paid jobs. It’s between jobs that can be done from home (which happen to be highly paid) and jobs which need specialized equiment/location (which do not).
If I were working a highly paid job where I had to manage a server farm I’d also need to be on location simply due to the requirement of constant physical access.
If you don’t see it as a perk, you should take that into account when negotiating salary.
For me personally (someone who doesn’t see it as a perk), I’d need a higher salary (compared to an in-office job) to consider a remote work arrangement – because I’d need to cover the cost of my coworking space.
Doesn't even the Bible say "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance. But from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."?
On a serious note, there are obvious restrictions on who can work from home with intellectual jobs preferred over physical labor. And wasn't it always this divide? Even in communist countries it was sought after to get a college degree and perform intellectual work because it's better paid and has advantages.
> “…tested the model on a part of our sample that it was not trained on and found that it achieves a 98% accuracy rate in replicating the human classifications. Armed with our highly accurate LLM…”
So concerned with checking the box of incorporating AI into their work, the writer managed to quickly associate AI’s classification with “must be right”.
Ah yes. The old “if everyone can’t have it, no one can have it” argument. Journalists are just elementary school tattletales at this point. Aren’t we also being told that because we can work from home we’re going to be outsourced?
Unsurprisingly, workers whose skills are in high demand and short supply (eg highly educated, highly experienced people) can demand better work conditions such as pay and commute flexibility.
Honestly a lot of the “low skill jobs” actually have a high skill threshold but we just arbitrarily decide to suppress them.
Take somewhere like Starbucks. They pay them minimum wage, churn em constantly so they’re never trained and make them work arbitrary shifts like 4 hour -> 2 hour unpaid break -> additional 4 hours.
Those staff end up “low skilled” but in reality someone who was treated fairly and respected would get very good at running the shop. They’d be able to turn out twice as many drinks and they would actually care about running costs and cleanliness. You wouldn’t get the constant underlying corruption by mistreatment where they can’t be bothered to check stock levels and throw away a grand of material a week on inefficiency.
My view is that many jobs in major chains (e.g. Starbucks, fast food, retail, etc) become low skill because any of the real thinking skills are pulled into separate corporate offices with totally different roles. Decisions like how much to advertise, what to stock, sourcing inventory etc. are totally removed from the workers who run the store. This puts a ceiling on the skill level needed for the job.
Sure you can operate the machines and make a good drink, but what good is that if you have minimal influence over the menu?
This feels like a tortured argument to me. Starbucks seems to do fine using existing strategic so seems like they are “right” about the appropriate level of skill and investment.
Maybe someone else could have a strategy more like yours but it’s clearly not required.
An airline on the flip side cannot “try” this with their pilots.
My take is, you get to work from home if your job isn't that crucial. Jobs that are driven by cost rather than result.
I don't think most remote workers understand that eventually they must be cost competitive with any legally-applicable competitive workers. Are you ready to become cost-competitive with Mexican devs who know React well enough?
In ten years I predict most "remote" work will be pay-per-ticket:
1. Log in to hiring site to complete aptitude test.
2. If pass, get a ticket and propose solution.
3. If solution isn't accepted, goto 1. If another worker solved same issue for less money, goto 1.
4. Close another ticket within X hours. If not, goto 1.
Anyone stuck in this loop may very well fantasize about aspirational careers like being a UPS driver.
I totally understand the reaction. Then again, people with kids have it hard enough, let alone those that with low paying jobs. When that happens to me, I get annoyed, but then, I remind myself that I get to exit the call while the other person has to stay in that environment, trying to hustle for money, and I try to show them as much kindness and grace as is possible for me in that moment.
When this lady applied for the technical phone support job, did she mention that her toddler would be on the calls?
If her manager were to “secret shopper” call in, how much kindness and grace would they show for being forced to sit though a children’s cartoon while quoting 5-figure invoice numbers back and forth?
To emphasise she probably didn’t realise their was background noise. I don’t phone call centra much but the background noise in some is very frustrating.
> If her manager were to “secret shopper” call in, how much kindness and grace would they show for being forced to sit though a children’s cartoon while quoting 5-figure invoice numbers back and forth?
Hopefully the identical amount? I don't know why the answer would differ in any meaningful way.
What is bad? Stating that her company would find this to be an unacceptable standard of service quality?
Sharing experiences and opinions on HN that are unpopular?
I didn’t complain to the worker, the company, or give her any attitude about it. None of that would have helped me get my task done.
They have other agents who are more professional, so next time I could get routed to somebody else.
To answer your question:
If the noise was an office cacophony then I’d put the blame on the company that tolerates it.
The noise was a children’s cartoon and a babbling child.
The worker has a responsibility to either get noise-canceling tools or work from a quiet area of the home. It’s 2024- it’s really easy to do either one.
It's easy if you earn $100k+ of course. It's not easy with $40k in a two-bedroom house with a toddler as a single parent.
"But then, she's not supposed to have that job if she can't do it," I can already hear you say. To that, I'd say sure, you could do that, if you're willing to pay for a several year long maternity leave from your taxes until the parents can place their kids in kindergartens.
this is a cultural problem. in asia and africa people take their kids to work all the time. part of this is because parents can't afford childcare, but part of it is also: "why not?".
i find our western attitude towards kids disturbing. after living 15 years in china i have come to realize that western, and even more so the european, and especially the german and austrian attitude towards work and school is much more conservative than i thought.
and as a parent, i find that very sad.
i wish every parent the opportunity to spend as much time with their children as they can. and if that means that they play where the parents are working, then i am all for it. rather that than sending them off to daycare. (there are exceptions of course where the environment is not safe for kids to play)
The biggest benefit of working from home, which i have been doing since my older daughter (now an adult) was an year old. Self employed too, so have flexibility. I also home educate which would not have been as easy without working from home.
My last employer had childcare available onsite at work, and that should be more common too (I did not use it because my now ex did not work, but still very good for a lot of my colleagues).
I also find it sad how little time many parents have with their kids. We really need to make employment a lot more family friendly in general.
Not everyone loves children, is the unspoken unpopular thing to say. Even more unpopular: dogs. These are things I wish not to see in an office, nor a bar environment. Actually see isn't the issue, it's the uncontrollable, but considered normal, noise that I find stressful.
I agree about dogs. Children however are just like adults in how they're all different and have their own personality etc., so I think society is suffering from delaying this integration into society. We all grow up and eventually have to integrate with others, and it seems because of this separation of ages that we will have a less cohesive society and culture in so many ways (which I think is visible already, as mentioned in this thread).
See I adore dogs and yet I can easily visualize and understand what your reaction would be like to having a dog around during your work day.
I find this or that sound a dog makes endearing- you find it annoying or worse. I find the mess a dog makes a mild inconvenience- you find it disgusting.
Instead of telling you you’re overreacting or that you’re being insensitive to people who are obligated for some reason to include their dog in your meeting with them, I can agree with you that you shouldn’t have to have dogs in your working life if you never chose this.
And it’s not me doing you a favor by accommodating your unique sensitivities; the default should be your version, not my version.
The thinking is if they have a kid then they’re the victims of heartless monsters (e.g. me) who expect them to work at the same level of professionalism as people who don’t have kids.
I'm not annoyed at these things because as I have gotten older, I've realized that society has become fiercely anti-child in the west. You get nasty looks if your infant cries virtually anywhere in public other than a hospital. Again, you get nasty looks if your child acts up anywhere. There are no "safe spaces" for parents of young children other than schools and playgrounds, we've ostracized them very effectively in our current culture.
Thus, when I hear a babbling babe, I smile and move on. We're going to have a Japanese population pyramid situation if we keep discouraging parenthood and punishing child-rearing. There are virtually no societal or financial benefits to doing so these days, its a total sacrifice of self.
I've had it happen and my reaction has been "I get it, everyone is going through stuff, it's awesome that they get to be working during the pandemic"
I do despise the call center background noise where I'm hearing other people making calls. but the person on the phone has no control over that. I'll take WHF over RTO any day
Huh, I have the opposite reaction. Whenever I’m on a work call and my colleagues apologize for their children shouting in the background I’m mostly fine with it.
If anything it makes them seem more human when they’re otherwise just some disembodied voices.
I think it depends a lot on the specifics, if the background noise is loud and persistent enough it makes it harder to understand the other person. Hard to tell from OP's description but I'm guessing it was actively impacting the conversation if they're complaining about it.
Admittedly it wasn’t loud enough to make it hard to hear words.
You know when you call your cell phone company and you’re routed to a Call Center in India/Philippines and you hear snippets of other people’s support calls in the background?
It sort of throws you off throughout the call. You wonder if the agent is getting everything you’re saying, given the distraction.
It was that, but with a children’s cartoon and a toddler.
I think this is an overreaction. It was likely as simple as hanging up and calling again, if it bothered you so much. Or did you consider providing some polite feedback that the background noise was distracting you, I have had people buy headphones advertised as noise canceling and assume they work well but only realize they didn't until pointed out to them. Or did you even consider that she might work from an office and just had an off day - had a malfunctioning headset for the day or had a sick kid at home and so opted to work remotely for the day.
Also, is this even about working from home? I have worked in multiple offices which had open layouts and other meetings/conversations going on in desks around me and very distracting too.
Personally, imho, I work remotely and have a quiet room to myself but I also understand that other people I work with have lives too, and if it really bothers me I just tell them that politely, if you are courteous then its likely most people are going to be to you too, and do what they can to help. It makes me wonder if you have already made up your mind about the person you spoke to and about work from home and are finding reasons to justify it.
What you ignored was a confrontation but made assumptions and judgements about the person, their work, and their ability to work from home and concluded the issue was with working from home, without providing feedback or attempting to learn more about the situation, and then complained on the internet. How would you like it if your work performance/feedback was handled this way? IMHO, I don't think that's a very professional way to handle a work issue/relationship. I would have been more sympathetic to your issue if you had made an attempt to provide feedback or tried to resolve your problem, and if the other party failed to help.
What assumptions did I make, other than that if they can hear a toddler and a cartoon in the room, and if their job is phone calls, then they should take care that this isn’t distracting on phone calls?
I don’t have a relationship with them- they’re one agent of a handful, whom I’m obligated by my client to call a couple times a year.
I’m not in a position to give feedback on their work performance. Nobody needs me to have a confrontation with them. I’m not their coworker, boss or direct customer.
This is a HN post about WFH and I’ve shared an anecdote about somebody’s toddler babbling during our work call.
I admit mine is an unpopular opinion- we’re supposed to celebrate parents who work so hard to balance their duties with their entirely elective decision to have children.
Eh, some of the people I know with the worst WLB are people that do not take work that seriously during working hours. They end up living at the office basically because it takes longer for them to finish their tasks and they also end up with their social life/break time tied up in the company.
In this case, if it is disruptive enough to the call then that makes it take longer to get done what you need to do. The quicker you get done what you need to do, the quicker you are done with work. I'm not a fan of judging things just because they are "unprofessional" but there are unprofessional things that actually make everyone else's lives more difficult.
Well, these things are subject to interpretation, of course, but I don't think it's a stretch to call the following a personal attack, as it creates a pejorative image and applies it to the other person (and adds negative intensifiers like "of course", "just", "got emotional", "secretly resented"): "I presume you said nothing to alert her to the issue, of course? Just got emotional about it and secretly resented the woman for having children"
Similarly for "I do find humorous the idea that you can't even fathom", which is both personal and aggressive, and written in internet snark style.
Perhaps this won't be helpful as it sounds like I've already offended you, but I think most likely what's going on here is that most of us underestimate the provocation in our comments by a considerable amount (say 10x) and overestimate the provocation in the other's comments by a comparable amount (say another 10x), and that compounds to a 100x distortion in how we evaluate these things. They generally appear very different to a neutral reader.
So how would you have conveyed the intent of, "I don't think you're being fair to this woman, nor do I think you're attempting to engage with the problem you've described in a productive way."?
And no, I wouldn't say you've "offended me" per se, just that I find it disappointing you've chosen me, of the two people here, to reply to.
It would have been fine to post "I don't think you're being fair to this woman" and then add a description of what you think would be more fair to her.
I would stay away from remarks like "nor do I think you're attempting to engage with the problem you've described in a productive way"—that's already a swipe, and already personal, and therefore on the wrong side of the line by HN standards.
The GP comment wasn't great: it was ranty; the repetition of "lady" struck me as slightly distasteful; and the self-congratulatory reference to "unpopular opinion" is one of the worst internet clichés. However, I don't see that it broke the site guidelines; or at least not badly.
If I were going to reply as a mod to every comment that strikes me as bad...well, that would be physically impossible, plus would generate an endless firestorm from readers objecting to my interpretations. I have to be a lot more cautious than that! In practice that means sticking to cases where the majority of readers would likely agree that the site guidelines were broken unambiguously. That's still guesswork, but less guessy than it sounds.
Front-line staff have to clock on, get their toilet breaks timed, get drug tested, have weird random shift patterns, have to work at least one day on the weekend, have to cover for colleagues by doing a 16-hour shift, get paid overtime, can't nip out for a doctor's appointment, etc, etc, etc.
Happy for bosses to consider making the workplace more equal, but let's start by making front-line staff's lives easier rather than making everyone else's lives harder.