Employers systemically illegally discriminated against employees by falsely alleging that accommodating them with work from home was an undue hardship, and would just point at other employers not doing it to demonstrate this.
COVID forced WFH for business reasons and thus employers are no longer as easily able to illegally discriminate against their disabled employees since it's patently obvious that the accommodation is possible and it doesn't present some existential threat to a business to provide it. It's also that employers are simply more geared up to allow work from home and it's less of an actual burden in time and money.
The entire US business culture, which extends deeply into US culture as a whole, puts employers over employees at almost every turn. What protections workers in the US do have, businesses try to circumvent all the time, not to mention many things, such as the ADA have no concrete definitions for things like what a reasonable accommodation must be (they do have examples of generally accepted things, but it isn't a decree) which allows for all kinds of ways of non compliance.
Not to mention, its unfortunately common that exercising any rights workers have will often work against you, being passed up for promotions etc.
Its strange how much power we give employers over employees, and how regular people defend this, even when its actively working against them.
Average is really skewed though, because the top end is very very high and the more important metric would be net income, not gross income (which PPP does not account for)
If you look at net disposable income, the US is ranked 33rd[0]
You are correct. US is 33rd alphabetically and first by the disposable income.
What I find amazing is you have to really count the rows to get that US is 33rd (alphabetically) as the rows are unnumbered. OP did that and didn't realize the rows are sorted alphabetically.
I have also yet to see a single WFH advocate explaining how to square their replies to objections (usually "managers should find better KPIs") with their theory of the firm (you don't just rely on KPIs, unless you are as good as Bezos at what he does you can't just treat employees as replacable cogs that might as well be replaced by KPI driven freelancers and subcontractors).
> Its strange how much power we give employers over employees, and how regular people defend this, even when its actively working against them.
"Because, one day, I will be a rich person, and I will be able to be cruel to the little people. I don't want to prevent me being able to abuse people if I'm in that position!"
Also, "I am fundamentally smarter/better/more diligent than my fellow employees. My employer might recognize that with more compensation, but my fellow employees will not. They will drag me down and promote the unworthy."
Pitting employees against each other is a classic.
COVID acted like a coordinated forcing function. So it's unfair to claim that things would have been just as easy to move to WFH before COVID. Even the FAANGs of the world had to do a LOT of work to make smooth WFH happen, from working on optimizing capacity for teleconferencing software to actually making their corp networks work smoothly remotely at scale.
There is a difference between having one or two people work from home and have a large percentage of the company working from home. A company needs to be changed both culturally and with infrastructure to make it work well.
I think that’s a harsh take. Your last sentence is where the balance of the truth lies: COVID was a watershed event that ushered in new technologies and practices that have made WFH more viable and generally acceptable.
I worked from home before covid. The only thing that really changed for me was that they increased the VPN bandwidth and started consistently adding video calls to all meetings. The technology and practices already existed.
Zoom and Google Meet existed before COVID. What COVID did was force employers to choose between letting people work from home or shut down. Suddenly, what was impossible a few months ago became totally fine.
It didn't make WFH more viable or acceptable, it exposed the hypocrisy of employers.
You don't think that things are any easier now that most of the workforce has practical experience with video conferencing and how to coordinate with people in the same office?
I think we both learned how broadly possible it was, and also trained the whole workforce in how to do it.
Transition the whole team, and paying for a video conferencing software, to accommodate one person who can't come into the office is exactly what an "undo hardship" is.
In pre-Covid times didn't companies face this same insurmountable hardship when opening a second location? What do you call your co-worker that works in a different office if not "remote"?
I get that some people really like working in close proximity with others even if their job doesn't really require it - but this really seems to be the case of controlling employers demanding their troops trudge into to an office to demonstrate their value in person - pandemic or disability (or just the general annoyance of commuting to work and all that that entails) be damned.
> In pre-Covid times didn't companies face this same insurmountable hardship when opening a second location? What do you call your co-worker that works in a different office if not "remote"?
Teams were normally organized so you'd need the least amount of cross office communication as possible because it was recognized how inefficient it was. So yes they were "remote" but everything was organized to make sure you need to communicate with them as little as possible.
COVID was undue burden on most businesses, a lot of them needed PPP and other programs to survive.
I don’t think it showed remote work was not an undue burden ,it just showed that for many organizations that remote work is possible, not that it is fungible with in-office work.
> But there's nothing illegal nor discriminatory about companies having their workforce be in the office.
Basically, this is the disparate impact argument. You could make a similar argument about having the office only be accessible by climbing a flight of stairs.
>Given the absolutely massive disadvantages WFH imposes on an entire company it's almost certainly going to continue to be considered a unreasonable burden.
I've seen a company spend 10 grand to make a specific door automatically open for a guy in a wheelchair only for that person to move on to a different office 2 months later. So this guy would, get up, shower daily, fling him and a wheelchair into a modified car and get out of the car twice a day, drive over an hour round trip, navigate poorly made sidewalks without curb cuts, go up an elevator, just to eventually arrive at the button on the door so we could of course, celebrate the equality with which they are treated. Oh yeah, and he also had to do a bunch of extra work every day of his life in other ways. But a lot of these problems were related to time he was technically off the clock, so on paper, he was treated equally.
I sort of think it's completely mad the unreasonable burden disabled people have stoically shouldered for so long. I am really happy that COVID has really changed people's perceptions enough that more people seem to be asking for and being permitted accommodations and are generally less stigmatised for doing so. I'd really like to see the research that allowing the disabled specifically to work from home imposes a massive burden on the entire company.
I don't accept the argument that the fact that the majority of the population is not working from home, means we shouldn't allow a minority of the population to work from home. The whole point of disability accommodations is that the accommodations are NOT the norm.
> I really doubt that. Given the absolutely massive disadvantages WFH imposes on an entire company it's almost certainly going to continue to be considered a unreasonable burden.Comments like these make me realize just how much of a insulated bubble a lot of hackernews lives in. Less then 15% of the countries works fully remote and it's trending down.
How am I propagating falsities? If anything you're just confirming my bubble point. I say a very small percentage of the country works fully remote you link to a tech company just outside of Austin having a lot of remote workers and somehow think you're not living in a bubble?
> I say a very small percentage of the country works fully remote you link to a tech company just outside of Austin having a lot of remote workers and somehow think you're not living in a bubble?
Dell is a traditional company, not a modern tech company. It wasn't able to push RTO, and that's telling.
And why the hell the average labor statistics of a country outside the tech sector and office work would be relevant to WFH? There isn't a way to do construction work, mining, transportation etc through remote work yet, so they have absolutely no relevance to this discussion - which makes aggregate labor statistics irrelevant.
Please don't propagate irrelevancies: that link is about a single tech company is Austin TX and has nothing to do with claim about aggregate labor statistics for the country.
The latest BLS data is here:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/telework.htm#data
From the look of it WFH is somewhere between 10-20% depending on how you count full vs hybrid WFH.
Dell is a gigantic, traditional company. If it wasn't able to push RTO, that's significant.
> aggregate labor statistics for the country
Why would that be relevant? There are still physical jobs that require people to go to places to do things. All these discussions related to WFH pertain to the tech sector and office jobs that can be done remotely for the time being.
The parent made a claim about the aggregate rate and its trend. You asserted that this claim is false and then provided a citation that is irrelevant and contains nothing to debunk the original claim (which appears to be true based on BLS data).
You're now trying to change the terms of your original disagreement to be about the tech sector alone. This is fine, I guess, but I would really appreciated it if this conversation would provide actual data instead of an anecdote from a single firm that may or may not be representative of the broader trend.
> You're now trying to change the terms of your original disagreement to be about the tech sector alone
I didn't say only tech. I said tech and office work that can be done remotely. And which of the discussions at hackernews is not related to tech? 0.1%? The proposition doesn't make sense.
COVID forced WFH for business reasons and thus employers are no longer as easily able to illegally discriminate against their disabled employees since it's patently obvious that the accommodation is possible and it doesn't present some existential threat to a business to provide it. It's also that employers are simply more geared up to allow work from home and it's less of an actual burden in time and money.