The Work-From-Home Overcorrection
Because actually *going* to work is for poor people.
Five years ago, the biggest story in worker’s rights was the Fight for Fifteen. Minimum wage workers across the U.S. were organizing for the right to a living wage in exchange for an honest day’s work. We disagreed among ourselves about whether serving french fries through a window should pay a living wage, but we all understood the argument: folks on the margins, who were actually dependent on the lowest wage jobs, wanted better pay.
Fast forward to today, and we’re in the midst of another worker’s campaign. But the conversation about worker’s rights has shifted from full-time workers living below the poverty line, to software engineers in Silicon Valley. And the ask has shifted from a basic living wage to the ultimate entitlement: not having to physically show up at all.
The pandemic work conversation didn’t start out this way. Amid labor shortages and hand-written signs on fast food windows explaining that “No one wants to work,” low wage workers enjoyed their fair share of attention early on. But all that has been replaced with think pieces and journalistic deep dives on the future of white-collar work.
Why?
Did we move on from low-wage workers because they’re mostly thriving, doing safe, dignified work for a fair wage? Of course not. We moved on because, honestly… who cares about fast food workers?
Just take a scroll down your Medium feed. The really interesting question is why a person who makes $100,000 a year to stare at a computer should be inconvenienced in any way at all. In addition to a safe, secure, dignified living, we the skilled also deserve to ply our trades in the comfort of living rooms temperature-controlled to our personal preferences, with unlimited unmonitored breaks, plenty of time for personal phone calls, midday Peloton sessions, and every other entitlement the middle-class American mind can dream up.
Nevermind that normalizing remote work is obviously going to screw a good number of the people advocating for it. (If your employer has the choice of every worker in the world, and not just every worker willing to live in your town, your odds of being their first choice decline significantly.) Nevermind that working and socializing alongside people outside our chosen bubbles is a basic part of being a functional social being. Nevermind anything that might counterbalance the rush to further privilege the privileged.
I once read an article that called the New York City subway system one of the most democratic institutions in America. The article noted that every morning, stock brokers and construction workers stood shoulder to shoulder in the same train cars, traversing the city. If the system sucked, it sucked for everyone. But back then, the system didn’t suck. It was, by far, the best way to get to work. It didn’t matter that you were an investment banker who pulled down $5 million bonuses. There was no car fancy enough, no road private enough, to get you into the city faster than the MTA.
The current state of the subway aside, it’s worth stopping to think about what happens to public services, or public life, when middle-class people have the option to opt out of every minor inconvenience. Long commute with inadequate public transit? Why attend public council meetings or get involved in a campaign for better train lines when you can just not go to work? Toxic, demoralizing workplace culture? Why unionize and advocate for better working conditions for everyone when you can just advocate for you? Leave the janitors and cafeteria folks to deal with the microagressions and self-absorbed C-Suiters. Once you’re out of the office, you’ll never think about the janitors again anyway.
I recently read an article where a commenter noted that, for years, his pre-pandemic commute took him past a homeless shelter and a methadone clinic whereby he’d regularly interact with (give change to) the people lingering outside. Upon reading about the social alienation inherent in the work-from-home revolution, he was struck that since he’s been working remotely, he hadn’t given a thought to any of those people.
I’m not saying that white-collar work shouldn’t be more flexible. Or that middle-class workers don’t have real burdens, although I’m kindof saying that. I’m just saying that maybe a national labor discourse centered on how unreasonable white-collar working conditions are when retail workers are literally being punched in the face is a bad look.
Or maybe we’ve just reached a nadir in American capitalism, where actually going to work is just an increasingly shitty thing we leave poor people to deal with.
