Referring to employers saving money on real estate:
Bear in mind that while yeah, the employer is paying for that office space, and getting rid of some will save them money, it ALSO saves the employee a lot of money and time.
Unless you live 2 blocks away from the office, you’re spending a minimum of 10-15 minutes door to door, often much more, to get to an office - plus the cost of whatever commuting method you use. Driving, transit, or whatever - let’s assume that the average person spends 15 dollar a day on commuting, plus the need for clothing suitable for an office, plus the time.
Working from home easily saves me a hundred dollars a week in commuting costs, not to mention the time savings.
My company does have office space. The rare times I need to go there, it’s like a ghost town. Everyone is either working at the client, or teleworking (referring to pre-COVID, that is).
Anyway, if my teleworking lets them free up office space and save money, I’m good with that.
I can add, a good friend of mine works high level IT for an Ivy league school. He’s permanently wfh. The entire department is. Apparently the school is saving something on the order of $25-30k a year for each employee not on campus, between heating/cooling, insurance, janitorial, etc.
For me, working at home is not a benefit. It in no way improves my life. It sucks.
I believe I described my situation in my first post on the matter. It is pretty much impossible for me to work at home. It’s a nightmare. I just don’t have the space. It won’t work.
And I’m not good with subsidizing the real estate costs of a company with approximately $4 billion in revenue last year.
I think this might be driving a (larger) permanent wedge between poor and well-off kids in K-12 grades. If parents are fairly well off, buying a tablet, microphone and upgrading the wi-fi is easy. And they can even pay for tech help if Johnny’s tablet isn’t reliably streaming the class for him. But a lot of poor kids in the low-income areas aren’t technically equipped to keep up, and they’ll get further and further behind during remote schooling. Once this happens, it could be a permanent drag on their progress.
Kudos to Dallas school district on handling this issue. They equipped their (now unused) buses with routers and scattered them amongst the low-income areas to provide coverage. I thought this was really good thinking on the part of the district.
i forsee a renewed respect for teachers coming about… you wont believe how many people are realizing how hard schooling a child is …although in another post someone said everyone’s just missing their publicly funded babysitter (i’m paraphrasing hes aid it in a meaner way) ina thread discussing school reopenings …
I can see here in la country at the next contract negiotations the teachers using " well we cna go back to online schooling" as a tactic …
Having school-age children home during the day, some number of days a week, is going to completely shatter the finances, perhaps the entire lives, of many families in which both parents work. My family being one of those.
Even more than that. Upper- and middle-class parents are hiring tutors or teachers to teach their kids privately. Some are getting together to jointly hire a teacher for a “pod” of kids. Obviously not something possible for everyone.
That was discussed at some point, but what we did instead was distribute hotspots. One pretty appalling thing was that they weren’t means-tested and we had some VERY affluent families request and receive one because with two professionals working from home, the internet was suffering. These were households that could easily have afforded to upgrade their own internet, or ask their workplace to cover it. I was so mad, especially when it was early on and we didn’t have enough.
On the other hand, I had a student who had 8 younger siblings in her house, and every day she walked the school-age ones down to her local elementary school, like a line of ducklings, so they could sit outside by the school and use the WiFi. I was super impressed.
Today’s paper announced the bankruptcy of Lord and Taylor, as well as Men’s Wearhouse and another clothing chain. Combined w/ increased work at home, and the pre-existing trend towards casual dress, will traditional business attire become even more uncommon? Or, when/if things open back up, will people be eager to strap on ties, high heels, etc.?
If teachers and their unions aren’t careful, one of the permanent effects of this could be the destruction of or minimizatiin of traditional school models.
Teachers refusing to come back in fall has led to an explosion in alternate ways of educating children. Homeschooling, tutoring, private schools, ‘parent pods’, etc.
Maybe the future of education will see now-vacant strip malls being filled with entrepreneurial education services like socially-distant labs and art studios that take in a dozen kids at a time. Next door is ‘ABC education’, a tutoring service with isolated cubicles and tutors helping the kids. Neighborhood schooling groups form, where parents pitch together to fund small outings and to share in child-care duties.
If the teachers keep pushing demands - especially demands unrelated to COVID such as defunding the police or demanding an end to charter schools as a condition of re-opening as LA county teachers are demanding, they just might find politicians redirecting school funds to educational startups and parents. Maybe we’ll wind up with a better, more diverse, cheaper educational system
…this sounds like a future dystopian nightmare. Except: it isn’t the future.
The destruction of the public education sector (in America) will mean that education will be reserved for the rich. This won’t be the fault of unions, nor will it be the fault of teachers who simply don’t want to return to school to face a possible death sentence. Its the inevitable result of a fundamentally dysfunctional society.
That attitude is mostly found among middle management, who want to see what the worker bees are doing in real time in order to feel that they’re doing something useful. Squeezed from below (“It’s ridiculous to waste hours commuting when I can do this online”) and above (“Hey! We can sell off half our office space and use the money for something more worthwhile, like bigger executive bonuses!”), they’ll just have to suck it up and adapt.
True, but my company experienced having all our offshore call centers in India and the Philippines abruptly (as in police swarming in midshift) shut down early in the pandemic; this was a nightmare for the skeletal onshore staff. Setting up WFH for offshore has been really challenging (much more than onshore), and we’re having increasing problems in India.
I thought the military ban on people who have had Covid-19 might be a major change for the US, but when I looked into it the ban on people who had even been infected with Covid enlisting only lasted about a month, and now it’s just part of ‘do they have any heart, lung, or other physical impairments that would disqualify them’.
TBH, I can interact with Uncle Fred in person while watching the game/concert in one of our living rooms. But people who attend live events often want to meet/interact with new people or just be out of the house which aren’t things you get with a shared VR environment.
I mean, maybe you’re like my BIL and don’t like people, so this sounds great to you. But not everyone is like you, and my idea of hell is one in which I work from home and attend all social events in some sort of virtual form. I haven’t been working from home , I’ve been going to work every day. I’ve cancelled three vacations and I think I’ve left my house six times in 5 months other than going to work. My mental health is deteriorating already- if live events and travel aren’t going to come back at some point it’s only going to get worse.
I don’t hate people, but limiting large-gatherings in the midst of a deadly pandemic is not that big a sacrifice to make in order to protect myself, my family and society at large. I need to be particularly careful because I have 2 at-risk daughters: one is severely asthmatic and the other has moya-moya disease (the one time she got the flu, it triggered a stroke that left her permanantly partially paralyzed). I can’t risk bringing Covid-19 home to them.
Humans will never and should never be 100% isolated, but reducing contact as much as possible (without torpedoing the economy, or going stir-crazy) is achievable and will probably be enough to lower the rate of infection to acceptable levels (while also keeping social distance and wearing masks during viral peaks).
When Covid-19 subsides, I think the lessons learned from this pandemic should urge society to adapt to a basic paradigm shift of living in a world increasingly prone to future, perhaps deadlier pandemics. Unfortunately, as population density increases, I fear pandemics will increase, too.
A fortunate side benefit to social distancing and decreasing roadway traffic are the positive effects on the environment. Positive effects have been realized in just the short period of this pandemic—examples here.
So, no, I don’t hate people. In fact, I like people and want as many of them to remain alive as possible. And, I’d like us all to live on a planet not devastated by out-of-control global warming. If working from home and not attending large gatherings of people is at least a small piece of the puzzle to achieve that goal, sign me up!
Bottom line: you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
