The Fair Work Commission is considering basic rights to work from home. Here’s what the evidence says about the impacts of working from home on physical health and mental wellbeing.
I find it very strange that remote work does not enforce atomization of labor and have a chilling effect on labor organizing. I would think a brain in an individual cell where you can turn on and off its access to other brains at will would be the ideal work arrangement from the boss’s perspective. Whereas a company cannot control where its assembled workers meet up after work
Yes but when working remotely you are often using company equipment and company-monitored software to connect, unlike a public meeting place off campus. Not arguing with you just elaborating on my confusion.
That’s not always the case, I’m working from my own machine at my current job. But even when you work on company owned computers, you can always connect with people out of band using your phone, etc. I never use work channels to talk about non work things, but if I hit it off with coworkers then we just find a chat platform we both use and connect there.
Interesting. Feels like I’ve met and spent a lot of time with random people bc they are either coworkers or know my coworkers in some way, social cross pollination that would never happen remotely.
Also I would never put company shit on my personal computer. What if they get sued or go bankrupt and go through discovery, and now your personal hard drive contains company evidence? That’s just me tho.
I feel like the impact of the labor atomization thing is greatly mitigated by the fact that 1) the types of workers who have fully-remote capability are, in my uneducated guess, probably not unionized anyway, and 2) remote work is so cushy that people aren’t agitating in their workplace for better conditions
I do agree that seeing people in person makes it easier to make connections, but it’s definitely possible to do with remote work too. And yeah I guess if a company got sued then that could be a problem. I got kinda lucky cause I got laid off a few years ago when the SV bank crash happened, but they let me keep my work laptop. So, I’ve just been using it as my dedicated work computer.
And yeah, I think you’re right that remote workers tend to be relatively cushy and hence there’s less tension between them and the company.
I find it very strange that remote work does not enforce atomization of labor and have a chilling effect on labor organizing. I would think a brain in an individual cell where you can turn on and off its access to other brains at will would be the ideal work arrangement from the boss’s perspective. Whereas a company cannot control where its assembled workers meet up after work
I think it’s because people connect online, so you no longer have to be physically present in the same space.
Yes but when working remotely you are often using company equipment and company-monitored software to connect, unlike a public meeting place off campus. Not arguing with you just elaborating on my confusion.
That’s not always the case, I’m working from my own machine at my current job. But even when you work on company owned computers, you can always connect with people out of band using your phone, etc. I never use work channels to talk about non work things, but if I hit it off with coworkers then we just find a chat platform we both use and connect there.
Interesting. Feels like I’ve met and spent a lot of time with random people bc they are either coworkers or know my coworkers in some way, social cross pollination that would never happen remotely.
Also I would never put company shit on my personal computer. What if they get sued or go bankrupt and go through discovery, and now your personal hard drive contains company evidence? That’s just me tho.
I feel like the impact of the labor atomization thing is greatly mitigated by the fact that 1) the types of workers who have fully-remote capability are, in my uneducated guess, probably not unionized anyway, and 2) remote work is so cushy that people aren’t agitating in their workplace for better conditions
I do agree that seeing people in person makes it easier to make connections, but it’s definitely possible to do with remote work too. And yeah I guess if a company got sued then that could be a problem. I got kinda lucky cause I got laid off a few years ago when the SV bank crash happened, but they let me keep my work laptop. So, I’ve just been using it as my dedicated work computer.
And yeah, I think you’re right that remote workers tend to be relatively cushy and hence there’s less tension between them and the company.