Reflections on working from home

One of the most widely discussed societal impacts of Covid, mentioned on p.121 of the latest edition of my book, has been the shift from working at work to ‘working from home’, to the extent that the acronym WFH has entered everyday vocabulary. Many believe that, even as lockdowns and restrictions end, it may permanently change the way much work is organized. In line with the overall framework of my book, such changes can’t be separated from wider social and political issues.

An acrimonious discussion

Even during lockdowns and other restricted periods there was some acrimony in the WFH discussion. On the one hand, it was said with some justification that WFH was a luxury for those in certain kinds of white-collar and professional jobs leaving those in manual, retail or, most obviously, healthcare roles with much greater exposure to infection. On the other hand, and again with justification, it was clear that WFH was experienced very differently according to whether ‘home’ was a small urban apartment or a large house with a garden; and to whether it also doubled as a makeshift school or play group, and if so who took responsibility for that. In this way, inequalities of wealth, income and gender are inseparable from WFH.  

Beyond those issues, WFH brought other features of work into a new focus. Some found it liberating in all kinds of ways – from ending the hassle of commuting and other work travel, to avoiding the strictures of office dress codes, to gaining greater control over when and how to work and, with that, a better work-life balance. Others (or even the same people at different times) missed the social interaction of the workplace, felt tyrannized or intimidated by working on-line, resented the costs, found it impossible to juggle the competing demands of working and living in one space, and were exposed to a much greater degree of on-line surveillance.

Back to work

It’s a discussion which has become even more highly charged as restrictions have eased. Many people have not wanted to return to the old ways, and want to continue WFH for all or part of the time. Many employers have accepted or even welcomed that, others have resisted or even, as at Elon Musk’s Tesla, refused to accommodate it.

This has become a politically high-profile issue in the UK because the government has been keen to make civil servants stop WFH, with Jacob Rees-Mogg – the Minister for government efficiency – being an especially strong advocate for this. Notoriously, he has even taken to leaving passive-aggressive notes on the desks of civil servants who are WFH, cajoling or shaming them to return to the office. One obvious aspect of this politicization is that it is part of a populist narrative in which WFH is depicted as a cushy perk for ‘the elite’, denied to ‘the people’, although doing so ignores, amongst other things, the fact that so much call centre work has been transferred to WFH.

Within this populist narrative, there is also a certain kind of managerial understanding whereby workers are seen as skivers, and need the discipline of being ‘at work’ in order to work. That, too, ignores the at best mixed evidence about whether WFH is less productive than working at work, as well as the fact that, wherever work is done, electronic surveillance is far more prominent in the modern workplace than personal overseeing. Indeed, images of Rees-Mogg’s work desk, bereft of any kind of computer, were widely mocked as indicative of his ante-diluvian understanding of this entire issue.

An (ex-)academic’s interest

The WFH debate is obviously of interest from an organization studies point of view, but it also interests me personally. The first UK lockdown started just as I handed in my resignation in order to take early retirement. I thus spent the last few months of my academic career working entirely from home, and have not experienced ‘going back normal’. But, like many academics, I have always worked from home when possible. This can, I suppose, be regarded as a perk or a privilege, but it arises from the nature of at least some academic work in that, apart from teaching and meetings, there’s really no need to be on university premises for a lot of the time. Things like teaching preparation and marking, for example, can easily be done at home, as can writing up research and many kinds of data analysis.

That varies by discipline, of course, because for engineers, experimental scientists and others much research work needs to take place in laboratories (for that matter, many humanities and social science academics need to do research in libraries, archives or, in the many various senses of the term, the field). It may perhaps also be affected by seniority, in that the more senior you are the more likely you are to need to attend meetings because you are more likely to have extensive managerial responsibilities.

Shirking, flexibility and productivity

At all events, overall, over the years, I probably worked at least as many days at home as I have ‘in the office’. That did not become more true over the years in that it is not particularly an artefact of new technologies, although they have also had an impact. It’s certainly the case that doing so always engendered a certain amount of resentment or misunderstanding from neighbours, friends and family who often assumed that WFH meant not working at all or, at least, that you are available for interruption in way that would not be the case when ‘at work’. That is clearly a version of the view that WFH is shirking.

It was a view shared by at least some university administrative and support staff, who did not have this flexibility and had to work normal office hours ‘in the office’, and I think did sometimes feel that academics were privileged and even lazy. And it has to be admitted that this was sometimes true. It’s also the case that over the years university senior managers have become more hostile to academics WFH, and have (increasingly successfully) sought to control and restrict it. Again, that is not entirely without justification in that some academics do use WFH as a way to avoid things they don’t like doing. There is also a certain irony in the extreme resistance of many, especially older, academics to losing exclusive work-space (i.e. single-occupancy offices) even though it quite often sits empty.

Against all that, in my experience the vast majority of academics are not in any sense shirkers, and used WFH responsibly and sensibly. Personally, I would say it made me more ‘productive’ and certainly more flexible, in that, it’s true, there might be days when I was ostensibly working from home but in fact doing something else, and sometimes somewhere else. But, invariably, that was far more than compensated for by working at home but outside of normal office hours.

If anything, my experience is that being flexible in practice meant working longer hours, precisely because ‘home’ was also a place of work and, in that sense, evenings and weekends don’t have the same separate status from work that they otherwise might do. Equally, I can recall periods in my career when I used to go into my university office at weekends to do certain kinds of work for which I needed what in those days were paper files, and by doing so could work uninterrupted in a way that I couldn’t when in the office during normal working hours.

WFH: a privilege?

I appreciated that flexibility, but I am not sure that it is quite right to regard it as a privilege. In one particular respect, and despite the strictures of some university managers against it, it arises partly from the need of universities to recruit in a rather specialised labour market. This, combined with the nature of academic salaries, the housing market, and the realities of dual-career families, means that in many parts of the country universities could not staff themselves without appointing people who live many miles, in some cases many hundreds of miles, away, and even in different countries. That is viable only because of an unwritten understanding (often in direct contradiction of what is in the written employment contract) that it is possible to WFH for a good proportion of the time.

That has had some good consequences for universities in terms of increasing the scale and diversity of the employment pool. I think it has also had some adverse impacts in terms of sustaining academic culture. For example, it has become much harder than when I started as an academic to get large attendances for departmental research seminars and the social events that often used to come after them. That’s partly because of increasing workloads, but I think it is also a consequence of a more geographically dispersed faculty.

Equally, although the erosion of the traditional notion of universities as ‘self-governing communities of scholars’ has mainly occurred for other reasons, I can’t help thinking that this geographical dispersal has been a contributing factor. Communities do need some degree of presence and, rather as with the issue of the social interactions of the workplace, these can’t be altogether technologically mediated.

Interpreting WFH

Aside from universities, for years, indeed decades, now, organizations and organizational theorists have been heralding – under all kinds of different labels – the rise of flexible work patterns in which the ‘when and where’ of work have been de-coupled, and the strict binary of work and non-work eroded (see p.84 of my book). The debates about that very much mirror the current ones about WFH. In brief, it can be regarded as giving people more choice and autonomy, whilst serendipitously making them more productive. Or it can be regarded as encroaching on, even absorbing, the non-work spaces and times of people’s lives in the relentless pursuit of productivity. It can be regarded as more controlling, or as less so; as supporting work-life balance or as eroding it.

That contestability of interpretation might, amongst other things, suggest that the ‘answer’ to the desirability of WFH does not inhere in WFH itself. Rather, it depends upon the specific contexts and ways in which WFH occurs. It’s not on the face of it clear why anyone would regard working in the putting-out system as desirable or privileged compared with working in the factory system, or vice versa. By the same token, whilst WFH may have revealed many kinds of inequalities it is not the cause of them and they will persist regardless of whether people return to the office or not. And the inequality with which WFH can be enmeshed is quite different to the question of whether or not it is a productive way of working.

To put it another way, my years as an academic were privileged to the extent that being an academic used to be, and to some extent still is, a relatively privileged occupation. But that would still have been true even if I hadn’t WFH, and had I not been allowed to do so I would have been no more, and probably rather less, productive an academic than was, in fact, the case.

What is wholly illegitimate is for populist politicians like Rees-Mogg, themselves highly privileged, hugely invested in the perpetuation of privilege, and with no intention at all reducing structural inequality, to use WFH as a weapon in the faux-egalitarian politics of populism.

Jobs for the boys

Today, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has produced a widely-reported research document showing the huge growth of part-time working amongst British men in recent years. Specifically, amongst men aged 25-55 in low-wage occupations, those working part-time work has risen over the last 20 years from 5% to 20%. The 20 year timescale indicates that this is a long-term trend, not just an effect of recession.

There are various issues arising from this. Those highlighted by the IFS are that part-time work is much more common now amongst men in low-wage occupations than it is amongst men in higher paid occupations; and that the trend for women is exactly the opposite (the percentage of women working part-time in low-wage occupations has fallen).

These seemingly dry statistics are extremely important. Interestingly, they do not show increasing inequality (which the report shows has actually fallen) but they do imply increasing insecurity and precariousness in employment. In particular, they probably help to explain at least part of the populist convulsions in the UK and elsewhere which are largely driven by angry, white, working-class men whose place in the world has been threatened. Within that, the regional discrepancies in men’s employment and wages are also important, as they then join together with resentment against the ‘metropolitan elite’ to drive populism.

However, the particular aspect I want to focus on is the way that these figures speak of a kind of crisis of masculinity. For generations in Britain (and elsewhere) masculine identity has been bound up with being ‘the breadwinner’. That is both an economic and a cultural – and psychological – notion. Economically, it requires stable, secure and reasonably well remunerated employment. That is the ‘bread’ bit. Culturally, it enables having a successful place in the world. That is the ‘winner’ bit. And taken together, it is a potent identity: bread + winner = breadwinner.

It is important to understand that the loss of this identity is both economic and cultural because it explains why the corresponding improvement in women’s situation does not ‘compensate’ for the deterioration in that of men. It’s not enough to add together the overall household position and conclude that nothing has changed because economically the household is just as well off in absolute terms and (if the IFS Report is right) even in relative terms. That does not assuage the cultural and psychological hurt of lost identity and meaning.

A generation ago, as explored in Paul Willis’s fantastic ethnography Learning to Labour (1977), young boys could disdain education because an unskilled factory job was there for the taking. That world has disappeared, but the sons and grandsons of those in the study have not moved on (see also Dolby et al., 2004). The sub-title of Willis’s book was ‘how working class kids get working class jobs’, but those jobs – in the form they once existed – have massively declined.

The most under-achieving educational group in the UK is now white working-class boys, three-quarters of whom fail to achieve five good GCSEs. This directly impacts upon their employability, as does the more nebulous issue of behavioural skills (time-keeping, self-presentation etc). Thus just as the opportunities for good jobs erodes so does the capacity of white working-class British boys to get whatever good jobs there may be, feeding directly into the populist anger against immigrants seen to be ‘taking’ the jobs. It is a situation that was starkly exposed by the 2010 BBC documentary The Day the Immigrants Left.

The biggest problem in all this is that three separate issues have come together: the changing nature of work in developed countries; immigration; and what it means to be a (working-class) man. Populist politics speaks to the first two, but it has nothing to say about the third. The period that saw the transformation of work and the global economy also saw a transformation, through feminism, in understandings of what it meant to be a woman. I don’t mean by that the tired old trope that feminism has, somehow, undermined or de-masculinized men. That’s nonsense because it is not a zero-sum game in which ‘advances’ for women come at the ‘expense’ of men. I mean that what has still not occurred, and urgently needs to occur, is a transformation in understandings of what it means to be a man.

That is not to say that the only problem here is the cultural understanding of masculinity. Economics and culture are indivisible, which is why the feminist movement has always been about changing both economic and cultural realities. It has to be both. And because it has to be both, the populist approach to the new situation of men is inadequate, because it is solely economic. If (and, in my view, when) it fails to deliver it will leave working-class men even angrier and even more economically marginal. To avoid that, the old equation that real men = real jobs needs tackling on both of its sides.

Yes, we need more real jobs for both men and women. But we also need men to understand that being a ‘breadwinner’ is not the definition of a ‘real’ man and, moreover, that there are many different ways and many different potentials for masculinity that have little or nothing to do with work. Part-time work may well be a problem for many economic reasons, for both men and women; but it doesn’t carry the meaning of not being a ‘full-time’ man. To put it another way, if feminism broke the link between femininity and unpaid homemaking then what we need to do now is to break the link between masculinity and paid work.

References

Dolby, N., Dimitriadis, G., & Willis, P. (2004). Learning to Labour in New Times. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour. How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough, UK: Saxon House.

Fat cats?

The British government have today announced plans to further restrict redundancy pay-offs made to public sector employees. Proposing an £80,000 cap, this will only affect senior staff, and it is in part a response to a populist media campaign, enraged about public sector ‘fat cats’ not just because of redundancy pay-offs but, more generally, high salaries and ‘gold-plated’ pensions.

Fair enough, perhaps – although where is the comparable outrage about private sector rewards? – but it is worth considering how it has come about that public sector managers enjoy the high rewards that they do. For it was not always so. Traditionally, senior managers (then more often called administrators or officials) had substantially lower salaries than in the private sector, and were expected to be motivated primarily by their commitment to public service.

That all changed from the 1980s, when under the general ideology of the market and the particular influence of the ‘New Public Management’ that derived from it, it was argued that the public sector was inefficient because it did not have the dynamic management of the private sector and that, therefore, it had to offer rewards commensurate with those in the private sector so as to attract that talent. This new breed of managers could hardly be expected to work for so fluffy an ideal as public service – no, in line with the motivational theories of what was then called the New Right, they had to be paid top dollar. And they were – bringing with them many of the reforms that have laid waste to the public sector. But that is another story, about which I have written elsewhere in the blog.

One way of understanding this story is to see it as one of a huge number of examples where the consequences of decisions by now long-retired or dead politicians who were in power in the 1980s neo-liberal heyday have now come to fruition. Examples range from the decision to relax planning regulations on flood plain building because the market should decide where to build, leading to the floods of recent years, through to the deregulation that led to the global financial crisis.

It’s the same with the 1980s approach to those parts of the public sector that were not privatised (those that were, by the way, have mostly now died). Wind forward 30 years and we see that the very same ideologues who blasted the public sector for not paying the going rate for top managers now blast the public sector for … paying the going rate for top managers. It is a hypocrisy unleavened by any acknowledgement that the going rate for top managers is ludicrously high. Because of course their quarrel is not with top management pay rates at all, but with the very existence of the public sector.

Indeed, the attack on public sector fatcat pay is really only a way of finding a soft point to attack public sector pay in general. It is part and parcel of two claims. One is that public sector workers are paid more than private sector workers. The other is that public sector workers get 'gold-plated pensions’. Often, the two claims are linked together.

The problem with the first claim is that – again because of the impact of market ideology and neo-liberal reforms – the lowest skilled (and therefore lowest paid) jobs in the public sector have been outsourced to private sector contractors. Thus, of course, average public sector pay is higher. As regards pensions, in 2012 (the latest year for which I have been able to find comparative figures) the median-average public sector pension was £5,600 pa (mean-average £7,800 pa) and the median-average private sector pension was £5,860 pa (mean-average £7,467). It’s true that most final salary pension schemes in the private sector have closed; it’s also true that those in the public sector are closing (one reason being the pressure put on them by high paid managers).

So let’s by all means challenge the high pay and pensions of senior managers in the public sector. But doing so only makes sense if we do so across the board, perhaps by considering a maximum wage. In 1998 FTSE-100 CEOs were paid a huge 47 times the pay of their average employee. Shocked? Well, by 2014 they were paid 130 times as much as their average employee. We might think about Fred Goodwin, who brought down Royal Bank of Scotland and cost the taxpayer billions of pounds, scraping by on a reported pension of £342,500 pa, poor fellow. We might think about Paul Dacre, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail which has so vociferously campaigned against public sector largesse. In 2014 his pay and bonus package was £2.4M. The average UK pay in 2014 was £26,500 or 1.1% of what anti-elitist Dacre earned that year. The highest paid public official, and this by a long chalk, in 2015 was the Attorney-General at £205,000 or 8.5% of what public sector scourge Dacre earned the previous year. We might think about Jonathan Isaby, the Chief Executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance that campaigns against public sector pay in the interests of transparency – but, alas, so profound is his commitment to transparency that his pay isn’t on the public record, nor are the identities of the donors that fund the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Strange, perhaps, to learn that the Taxpayers’ Alliance are enthusiastic advocates of freedom of information, but we surely can’t doubt that everyone associated with them is an assiduous taxpayer, can we?

So let’s think about all that, let’s understand the hypocrisy of those who decry the consequences of what they advocate, and the underlying agenda they champion, and the kind of world they really want to see.

Required reading

Over Christmas I have been reading Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, Number 11. Like John Lanchester’s Capital, which I ‘reviewed’ on this blog, it can be read as a ‘state of the nation’ novel (Coe even makes a joke about this) and, via five interlocking sub-stories, it reprises some of the themes of his earlier books, especially What a Carve Up! and The Closed Circle. Overall, I would characterise these themes as being about the unwinding of the post-war welfare state and its accompanying collectivism, and the ongoing consequences of individualization, privatization and – a key one in Number 11 – monetization (in the sense of putting monetary value on things like education which might otherwise be regarded as valuable in themselves).

The title Number 11 carries several resonances: the address of Britain’s finance minister; the number of the circular bus route that a character rides so as to be warm without heating her home; the number of subterranean floors being dug below an uber-rich family’s London home to extend their already commodious residence. For it’s a satire – sometimes almost judderingly heavy-handed, other times almost painfully delicate – that often addresses some of the themes of this blog, especially those of inequality, tax avoidance, the pitfalls of choice, the politics of ‘austerity’ and, even, the perils of twitter.

The section that spoke most profoundly and personally to me is entitled ‘The Crystal Garden’ which tells of the doomed attempt of Roger, an Oxford academic of about my age, to track down a short film he had seen as a child:

“Roger was convinced … that life was better, simpler, easier, in the past … it wasn’t just a hankering for childhood. It was bigger than that. It was to do with what the country was like … in the sixties and seventies …. For Roger it was about welfarism, and having a safety net, and above all … not being weighed down by choice all the time … he loved the idea of trusting people to make decisions on his behalf. Not all of them. Just some. Just enough so that you were free to live other parts of your life the way that you wanted.” (Coe, 2015: 176)

It’s important to understand that this isn’t about nostalgia, or at least not just about nostalgia. It’s about a rupture that animates – in very different ways – the politics of both nationalists and socialists across, at least, Europe. In France, Les Trentes Glorieuses, Jean Fourastié’s term for the 1945-1975 period of economic growth and social security, captures the same sentiment that Coe expresses. This rupture is described in my book in terms of the shift in the 1970s to the new capitalism (pp. 104-120) and so, of course, present in the book I most heavily draw on in that section, Richard Sennett’s (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism. And it’s no coincidence that at the heart of Roger’s memory was “waiting for his father to come home from work – from the same place he worked for forty years” (Coe, 2015: 176) because stable employment was at the heart of the economic and social security of those years. As I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog, the erosion of that security constitutes the most pressing political issue of the present time in Western societies, in ways well-captured (for all that it is startlingly inattentive to the ‘critical management’ literature that says much the same thing) by Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism.

We can understand this in conventional political terms: the social democratic consensus of North and West Europe and, to an extent, the USA in the post-war decades was about the best economic and social arrangement that has so far existed (even if it did not always seem so at the time). But perhaps it is better understood without thinking in terms of economic or political theory. Bill Bryson’s humorous memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid expresses it well as regards the United States; David Lodge’s novel Nice Work captures the beginning of it in the UK, especially as regards academic life. And Coe’s book is the latest example of the powerful way that art and humour can illuminate social science.

In a somewhat related vein, another Christmas read was Douglas Board’s novel MBA. This is not nearly so well-written (but, to be fair, whereas Coe is a well-established professional novelist Board is a coaching and leadership consultant who has turned his hand to fiction) and it’s a fairly clumsy satire, if not farce, of business schools. Still, it does hit what are for me some familiar targets in terms of the corporatization and even corruption of the contemporary business school, including the hubris of high-flying deans (see Parker, 2014 for a real world example). And there are some acute insights along the way about, for example, the enmeshment of business schools and politicians in the marketization of the public sector that also get a look-in in Coe’s book. MBA certainly isn’t a great or even a good novel, but it’s the first that I know of that tackles the business school. I feel sure that this setting is ripe for the attention of a latter-day Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge campus novel.