The doctors and surgeons don't get to go home, but the hospital administration clerks might be able to. The doctors are higher status and make more. I wonder why that might be?
This is just cherry picking imo. Jobs that require f2f and physical interaction as a core responsibility don't get remoted? You don't say.
If public services are expected to keep operating, it's rather obvious that the skeleton crews required to keep them operating include the guys actually providing the services to the public.
But what's really important is that some self-righteous political activist saw in a pandemic a good opportunity to force his political views onto others. Good job, comrade.
Hey, this is random and I didn't know how else to reach you, but you left this comment on a submission of mine that got flagged: "We have had detailed investigations from virologists on here suggesting [SARS-CoV-2] is likely not synthetic."
Do you have sources for this? Even though my submission was about the SARS-CoV-2 virus possibly being synthetic, I would love to have sources to combat that idea.
While this is true, and unfair, IMHO it's not really an appropriate thing to try to fix in isolation. Some jobs are more remotable than others. We want to isolate people physically, so remotable jobs get remoted. The fact that those jobs are distributed inequitably is bad, but not something we can fix right now. And once this is over, it's probably not going to seem like something worth fixing at all, I suspect.
And FWIW: a much bigger injustice is how many of these jobs in the service sectors are ephemeral in these situations. Wait staff and shopkeepers don't merely have to go in physically to work, they're at a much higher risk of losing their jobs entirely (or having their hours cut as, say, restaurants scale back).
That latter problem is something we can address with appropriate policy.
I'd agree except I have friends in sales and almost unilaterally they were told to keep coming into the office, despite their entire job being done from phones and computers. Theres a pretty toxic culture in sales where everything is war, and you have to show how committed you are everyday.
I'm in sales and every role I've held (a grand total of 2 tbf) has been a "be in the office if you need to be" type deal. Same as other people I know in it or other other positions I've considered.
If spending the weekend at a convention in another state is what's needed to make the sale I do that. If drinking with a visiting client until 2am is what's needed to make the sale I do that. If coming in to the office when there's no need and I might get sick and die and more importantly not be able to make sales, I don't do that.
"Sales" is a very broad role to the point where I think someone saying they do it is closer to someone saying they "make things" or "perform services" rather than "software developer" or "lawyer". It's more of a department than anything. Experiences working in it thus vary greatly.
> I'd agree except I have friends in sales and almost unilaterally they were told to keep coming into the office, despite their entire job being done from phones and computers.
I work with people in sales, and IIRC they were the first ones to start to work from home, days before the software development teams started to follow suit.
It's not a class issue, but a company or even team issue.
Is it true that bankers are more remotable than tellers?
What percentage of the work that tellers do could move over to those things with the buttons that let you have the money? I forget what they call them. Automated machines of some kind.
I don't think it sounds like "fire the tellers". It's more about analyzing the necessity of them being required to report to work. For instance, a bank could just keep paying them without requiring them to work (Like Patagonia is doing for their operating staff...).
Once the higher level employees are staying home for their own safety, it's pretty chickenshit if the reasons the lower level employees are required to come in are things like profit and their lack of leverage, and not things like "they need to be there for the bank to operate at all".
At my internship, everyone used to joke about how interns are t real people. However, I was treated 10x better than any labour or retail job I have ever worked. It is amazing how well people treat you once you have a piece of paper that says “engineering” on it, I can’t even describe it
This was true for my office as well, but at the same time when I was in elementary and high school in advanced math classes with mostly other guys, I was always mocked for it by students of parallel classes. Life's not fair for sure.
As someone who has worked for a bank for years, what is a "banker"? Is it the legal team? the risk team? middle management? software developers? QA team? risk team? The execs? the cleaning staff?
And why are tellers not bankers? They perform one of the main public facing banking tasks/services.
Also how are tellers supposed to work from home? This is a rather unfair situation, but it's just the nature of the job, not some attack on the lower class.
> And why are tellers not bankers? They perform one of the main public facing banking tasks/services.
This question/claim only makes any sense if you're willing to consider that the cleaning staff might deserve to be called "bankers" too.
Tellers don't provide any banking services. They can't agree to hold your money or loan you money. They don't provide any advice. They're an implementation detail of the banking agreement you set up with an actual banker, a piece of plumbing that happens to be how you move money into or out of your account. Hence the popularity of automatic teller machines.
There are a large number of job titles. But I would say someone qualifies as a "banker" if they are responsible for a flow of money, or if their work consists of helping other people implement flows of money.
I would be comfortable calling e.g. a corporate treasurer a "banker" in this sense, though I wouldn't expect corporate treasurers to be included in the category "bankers" in the context of this piece.
For this piece, something like the intersection of (1) the definition I provide with (2) the class of people employed by "banks".
A teller occupies a position of responsibility in that they can cause a lot of mischief by misbehaving. But I don't think the responsibility to refrain from stealing from the company is the relevant kind of responsibility. A teller at work isn't supposed to be making any decisions of any kind.
No. The teller isn't responsible for those flows by transporting the money any more than the security guard is responsible for them by letting the customer go through the door.
It was in earnest. What seems to be going on here is that we have a very different understanding of what "responsible for a flow of money" means.
In my mental model, someone who handles, protects, counts, transfers, etc. money to and from customers is fairly literally "responsible for a flow of money".
I suspect you believe your definition requires a higher threshold and/or type of responsibility that these roles do not entail, but I don't see where that is in your definition.
I think maybe you what you mean is that our hypothetical banker is independently making some decisions around how / where / etc this money flows with some degree of autonomy ?
My point here was primarily just to say that it is maybe a bit thornier of a thing to define than you realize given that your definition in my honest opinion and in what I consider a reasonable reading did not clearly leave out one of the primary categories of employee that you intended it to exclude.
Sidenote - stating that "you will find most people will agree with me" is an, um, interesting method of argument.
> Sidenote - stating that "you will find most people will agree with me" is an, um, interesting method of argument.
Not at all. That is the standard for determining what something means.
What you're saying here is that I expressed an idea, you agree with me as to both what I meant by it and what other people would understand by it, but, for unstated reasons, you think my expression was metaphysically incorrect. Why?
The project of communication is for the listener to understand the same thing the speaker intended. If that happens, the communication was correct. As applied here, if I think "responsible for a flow of money", elucidated by a negative example, means something, and everyone else agrees with me that it means that thing... then that is in fact what it means. Words hold their meaning by common agreement, and solely by common agreement.
FWIW, "banker" doesn't seem to be a direct BLS job description. However, it seems that at least some bankers will describe themselves as a "banker" in the US Census, as there is a mapping from the census job title "banker" to the Occupational Classification System (OCS) term 'B007 FINANCIAL MANAGERS'.
> B007 FINANCIAL MANAGERS Management and management related occupations in the financial field of banking, trust companies, credit agencies, investment agencies etc. Workers in this occupation are concerned with the management of financial affairs. Include the following occupations:
> Bank Cashier, Branch Manager, Comptroller, Credit Union Manager, Controller, Treasurer, Financial Director, Investment Manager, Accounting Department Manager, Accounts Supervisor, Auditing Department Manager
> A banker is an employee of a bank or financial institution who services the financial needs of clients. These clients can be individuals or institutions, both with different needs. A banker tries to maximize the profit of a bank while maintaining appropriate risk levels.
> Essentially, bankers raise capital to make loans and investments. They charge interest and fees for the services and seek profit on the investments
How is this inequality more so than it is simple role differentiation?
Can tellers not be trained for better-paying roles? Better yet, education is available to those who wish to utilize it (though the education system clearly has its own inefficiencies).
How is "simple role differentiation" not a description of inequality?
When you ask that question, you are doing this thing where you don't try to address the concern people actually have, which is about what an equitable employer-employee relationship looks like, not "role differentiation".
Currently experiencing a similar situation. I work in quality assurance(medical devices) and we're the only ones on site right now besides manufacturing. About half of our department has been set up to work from home and management is working on getting the equipment necessary to set up everyone. Not to mention they'll now be paying "designated essential workers" double time and we will not be included because our job doesn't necessarily require us to be on site, just that we're lacking the hardware as of now.
bloomberg anywhere exists (cloud version) -- but there are regulations that require trader behavior to be monitored. no personal devices on the floor, for example, last thing you want is someone to send encrypted messages over signal that the SEC/your bank can't read. these seem to be mostly waived: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/finra-con...
While there’s nothing technically stopping them from being able to work remotely, in practice there are local regulations in place which means traders can only operate from the business location itself, using phone lines with recorded features etc. so they are unable to do insider trading. When offices had to be evacuated for other natural disasters, different offices in other parts of the globe would step up and manage the state of play until it was safe to return. TL;DR, yes, they need to come in.
This is the distinction between staff and line. Line produces, staff is overhead. Easy to cut staff but not line, as cutting line reduces production.
Problem is in some industries, staff have more political power than line, as we see in higher-ed and medicine. This upsets the balance and results in less/poorer quality production from line.
The hazard is jobs that are 1) not remoteable, 2) done by old people, and 3) done at high people density.
What I'm hearing from a friend who runs a branch of a major bank is that almost no one comes into the branch, because that's only needed for loans. The ATMs outside are busy.
Nine out of ten things I need a teller for a bigger ATM could handle. Like an ATM that will dispense any denomination of coins or bills or cashier's checks. I've seen ATMs that take checks, too.
I didn't know there were ATMs that didn't take checks.
In my experience with depositing checks into ATMs, they originally just asked you how much the check was for. This would obviously require human oversight at some point, but you as a customer never needed to interact with a human.
Eventually they started OCRing the checks and proposing to you what they thought the amount of the check was, subject to your correction. Human oversight is still needed, but dramatically reduced.
This is just cherry picking imo. Jobs that require f2f and physical interaction as a core responsibility don't get remoted? You don't say.