My biggest frustration with the WFH discussion has been that the vast majority of people say that the #1 (and sometimes only) reason they prefer WFH is to save time on the commute. But this has not led to any discussions on how we can actually improve the commute, improve housing policy so people can live closer to work, etc.
Instead, people have simply decided that theh will WFH instead, an option which isn’t available to the majority of workers, who are generally not as privileged as the people who can WFH.
The next step will be all the WFH people who are almost certainly significantly higher earners complaining about having to pay taxes towards improving commutes and public transit which they don’t even use, so gradually public transit will get worse and/or more expensive at the turnstile, making life even worse for the largely underprivileged who don’t have the option to WFH.
The push for WFH has been approached entirely from an individual perspective, which will result in further separation between the privileged and the rest, a further rise in inequality, a further increase in social disunity and a further destruction in community.
It didn’t have to be this way. We could have approached WFH in a much more community oriented way, having people WFH but simultaneously investing in making the lives of those who don’t/cannot WFH easier as well, through investing in better public transport, etc.
> But this has not led to any discussions on how we can actually improve the commute, improve housing policy so people can live closer to work, etc.
Letting most office workers not commute is the fastest way to improve the commute of those who must.
Letting most office workers not live next to their company's headquarters is the fastest way to free up housing space near company headquarters.
Making marginal improvements to the commute of 100% of workers pales in comparison to ending commutes altogether for 20% of workers. It doesn't matter if a lot of people still have to go to work, the ecological and economic benefits of getting that many people off the roads are massive, especially for those who still have to drive to work.
On the other hand, allowing those who can WFH to do so clears up road space so that people who must WFO don't have as much traffic to deal with. When you live in a society like the USA that has already created a car-dominated dystopia, and those cars don't scale for everyone to commute at the same time without massive traffic problems... it does take some of the pressure off the system, and ought to help some of those WFO people's commutes.
I think you're right that public transit won't fare well with WFH. But it was already so bad in the USA I'm not sure it can death spiral much more.
I don't want to live downtown! I want separation between my neighbors so I don't have to hear them, and so they don't have to hear me. I lived in apartments for nearly 15 years... never again.
We also have the cost of housing. I can't afford to live anywhere close to the places that tech places typically pick, and they like picking downtown because it's cool, hip, and trendy. Thanks to investors, people moving from the west coast to my city, and the significant lack of affordable housing being built, I had to move even further away from downtown to afford a house.
Come on... people work far less than they ever did before, that should be pretty obvious if you just think about it.
Further, tons of "work" is done with zero physical strain, lots of those "work" hours are the in-between stuff -- travel, meetings, calls, lunches -- meaning that actual hours laboring are even less.
Have you heard about 4DWW - Four Day Work Week? This is arguably the biggest and most-needed improvement in labor / worker rights in at least a few decades.
I can't wait until it is implemented across the whole world. England, Portugal, and other countries are at the forefront already.
Hey, I like the idea of working less too. But why is this needed? If 4 becomes the law, how long until people will demand 3? And we have already experienced shortages of goods recently, how will things get made or shipped or fixed if people are working 20% less?
All the efficiencies and productivity gains we've seen in the last 30 years have not resulted in increasing wages, but instead resulted in higher incomes of the executives and owners.
Perhaps more importantly, the 4DWW isn't a pie-in-the-sky proposal, there are numerous companies that have switched over and have found the productivity gains offset the lesser hours.
As for "how long until people will demand 3?" - we'll see. When AI starts pumping out the same quality of work as humans do, should all humans starve? Or should all humans work fewer hours and capture the benefits?
Wages have increased, but they've also been distributed to places like China, India, Vietnam, as business owners naturally seek low wage costs (and demanding 4-day work weeks will only accelerate the exportation of labor).
Although many first-world countries' median wage hasn't increased much (despite wage growth all around in warehousing, fast-food, etc), the number of high-paying jobs in tech, finance, law, healthcare, media and more has certainly increased. How many software engineers were making $150-250k annually in 1997?
Sure, if you look at the last 150 years, but the data you linked is basically flat since 1980: over the last 30 years in the United States, working hours are down 2%.
Yeah, if anything that chart highlights how workers in the US are getting screwed compared to countries like Germany on number of hours worked. They're working only about 77% as many hours, on average.
Yea, really screwed. Choosing the top country by least hours worked is not appropriate as a baseline. Look at Mexico, or any Asian country besides Japan. They work their asses off compared to Americans.
Of course, not everyone is a software engineer. But it doesn't seem surprising there would be a correlation between fewer hours worked and lower salaries, likely because employers who are able to pick countries to hire from will avoid those where individual workers do the least amount of work.
It's not 1:1 for other reasons either besides just pay, like you don't have to pay anything for college tuition in Germany and they have universal healthcare, so you pay a ton less for healthcare expenses also, so that helps close the gap for lesser pay (also, you're working 30% less hours on average, so you have more free time to pursue other things, including a part time job if you really need to).
$400/month of my take home pay for over a decade was just in student loan payments, and I got off easy compared to a lot of Americans there. My wife, for example, is still paying about $1000/month, and that's after knocking it down by about $30k recently thanks to a couple windfalls. And she's been paying hers for almost 10 years at this point as well.
They also pay about 80% of your prior salary in unemployment, whereas here it's a hard cap at a really small amount (I think last time I was on it I was getting about a third of my previous salary, and my salary was a lot lower then).
I don't know German, I don't think it's in the best location for geographic and geopolitical reasons (see Russian invasion of Ukraine, energy crisis, climate change), my family and friends are here and I value that a lot (also why I haven't moved to Silicon Valley despite living in the US), I already own a house where I'm at and it would be a pain to move, I've never visited and I don't tend to move to a place I haven't at least visited first (I had an opportunity to go in 2019 to volunteer to work a booth for a friend's company at the Essen board game convention, but got too busy), etc.
Personally Canada appeals to me more and I might move there at some point (or at least closer to the Canadian border), but I can still acknowledge there being good things about Germany while having reasons not to move there myself. I do think I should probably move somewhere with universal healthcare before I get too old as I will probably have enough health problems that would either bankrupt me or wipe out my retirement if I stayed in the US, like has happened to several of my family and friends.
If my time isn't free to use as I will it's work. I don't care if it involves zero physical strain or if I'm on a call or in a meeting. Being in a meeting is obviously work.
Your company is trying to get you to work as many hours as possible for as little money as possible, as a working person you should strive for the opposite. As a worker you are selling your labor (of which you possess a limited amount) and any rational actor in a capitalist society should attempt to maximize the gains on what they have to sell by charging the buyer as much as they can for as little as they can. I don't expect a large corporation to strive for less profit because they're "already making more than they did before".
To be clear I don't _like_ this state of affairs but so long as these are the rules ignoring them only deprives yourself and helps your company.
You are ranting, but not addressing the point that was made. The post above mine wanted work to become a "much smaller part of most people's lives."
I'm all for maximizing the earnings I make while working, and to be honest, sure, I'd like to build platforms and methods to earn passive income while I am not working. But I don't think it is necessary or required to somehow normalize a 20 or 30 hour work week. Further, I recognize that if my workday allows me to sit in a chair all day, as opposed to hard physical labor in harsh weather, then the moment my work ends, I'm physically capable of whatever leisure activity I want to enjoy. You might technically "work" by sitting in meetings for the same number of hours as people whose bodies are broken down by 40 due to backbreaking labor, but obviously you haven't "sold" your labor to the same extent.
But doesn’t this drive home OP’s point further? For people who work in service jobs - healthcare, schools, shopping, and restaurants/cafes, for example - how would you approach working less? People want to go out and eat and places are already struggling to hire. Parents want in person learning for their young kids.
Pay people more, hire more employees. The market will decide which businesses remain viable. I am honestly hopeful demand for places like restaurants decreases or the market becomes less viable because of the labor shortage, simply because that industry has mistreated its employees for so long and many have moved on the bigger and better things for themselves.
Its not just the commute but the other things around the house you can parallelize e.g. during a zoom meeting and save time. Doing the dishes, laundry, working out, running errands midday without traffic, not having to go to the dmv on saturday. That really opens up a lot more time than just the commute. Its really an entire paradigm shift of changing work from a block of time removed from the day, to just a series of tasks in your job queue that has some home chore tasks as well that can be taken care of when its actually convenient. You basically become an hpc job scheduler. Thats way more efficient than the blocks of time approach with going into the office and not being able to do these things.
This privilege (which is really just code for $$$) you mention existed in the same exact way prior to mass WFH, except that it resulted in more air pollution, more wasteful traffic, etc. Individuals rationally take a small scale solution to a direct problem instead of potentially solving a huge problem in 50+ years. The post in general is like ranting about not collectively curing cancer when someone asks for a bandage for a small wound.
Instead, people have simply decided that theh will WFH instead, an option which isn’t available to the majority of workers, who are generally not as privileged as the people who can WFH.
The next step will be all the WFH people who are almost certainly significantly higher earners complaining about having to pay taxes towards improving commutes and public transit which they don’t even use, so gradually public transit will get worse and/or more expensive at the turnstile, making life even worse for the largely underprivileged who don’t have the option to WFH.
The push for WFH has been approached entirely from an individual perspective, which will result in further separation between the privileged and the rest, a further rise in inequality, a further increase in social disunity and a further destruction in community.
It didn’t have to be this way. We could have approached WFH in a much more community oriented way, having people WFH but simultaneously investing in making the lives of those who don’t/cannot WFH easier as well, through investing in better public transport, etc.