There is no fundamental "human right" to work from home.
An employer has the "right" to ask you to work from their office in exchange for money. You have the right to accept or decline their offer.
An employer has the "right" to ask you to work from their office in exchange for money. You have the right to accept or decline their offer.
There are a lot of reasons why someone might not be able to move wherever they like. For example, they don't want to leave the area where they grew up, where all their friends and family live, and their kids go to school. Or where their partner can't move because they work somewhere like a hospital.
As for "slightly inconveniences"... maybe for some it's nothing more than that, but for many people it's been an absolute nightmare.
I admire your desire to make work more inclusive, but the irony is that working from home tends to benefit wealthy, educated individuals in highly-paid specialist jobs. We need a lot of other changes if we're to have mass remote working without a huge increase of economic inequality.
I'm talking about cleaners, administrators, callcentre workers, fast food staff, delivery drivers, supermarket shelf stackers, etc, living in a small flat in an unfashionable neighbourhood. They suffer very much from social exclusion, and handwavy arguments about how everything will just work itself out sounds naive and silly.
For a software dev (especially those with a few years of experience), work tends to be easy to come by. We pick up our laptop, tether to our mobile phone, whack out a few CVs and offers come flooding in. If you're unattached (single, no dependents) you can work from wherever you like - you write some code, push it to Git, and deploy to a server.
But most people's jobs and lives don't look like that. They are rooted by partners, children or elderly relatives. By jobs that require you to be there in physical form. By personalities that struggle with an immense amount of change. By pay structures and pensions that reward longevity.
To your last point, about how it remote working will have a negative effect on blue collar workers:
1. If remote-working is a human right, then it must be granted to ALL workers - regardless of the shade of their collar. I'm extremely sceptical that work requiring a physical presence will see a huge boost in wages. Thus, it risks merely be a perk offered to those already well compensated.
2. Since remote-working tends to benefit who already have large houses, fast internet, good technology, and good networks, it entrenches their position. If you currently earn minimum wage serving burgers in McDonalds, and can't afford a good laptop and internet connection, you will find it hard to even get on the ladder where remote-working is a norm. Thus it will most likely reduce social mobility.
Here's my argument - stop thinking of yourself as an employee. Instead, think of yourself as someone who buys the service. Think of a service that can be done either remotely or in person, but you STRONGLY prefer it to be in office/on-premises. For instance, psychotherapy can be done via Zoom, but you really want it to be in person. Or yoga class - you can do it in home via Zoom or Youtube, but you prefer the gym. Or classes. Or whatever, but think of something that you want to pay for and for you it has to be in person, even though it can be done remotely as well.
Now, think of a mechanism that guarantees that you can buy this service in person in a marketplace where every person has the right to work from home or not. Wouldn't companies have to create multiple vacancies and some vacancies would be 'work from work only' and some would be flexible? I see no other way. You can't be one sided and think only about employees or only about employers. You have to think about consumers too. After all, we are typically all three - we are hired from some jobs, we hire for others and we surely consume a lot in addition to producing something.
Well no, there were actually very few pre-covid. For example it s very hard for a disabled person to be a lecturer, despite tons of them being great researchers, and i have seen it this year with my disabled friend who had an explosion of opportunities to present her work in conferences, since every one of them became virtual.
On-premise work will become work at a premium. Want a real psychotherapist, fine but it will cost more. On the other hand, virtual will be cheaper. The rest is market re-balancing. I m not arguing that remote work should be mandatory everywhere, but in certain domains where it's easy and feasible, yes, legislation could push for more adoption.
Same with most other public work - let's take police. Yeah, if you are a beat cop, you've got to pound the streets. But you are a detective. Can't you say that you want to talk to witnesses and suspects from your home via Zoom? Sure witnesses might chose to visit the station, but you don't want to do interrogation in person, because you think that it can be done just as effectively from home. Or hospitals.
The more you think about it (at least in my case) the less idea of 'remote work right' makes sense. Option - yes, right - no. It simply makes things worse, not better.
If you don't understand it, try flipping the situation around. Try justifying 'the right to work from office' for a person like me (which is not totally true - I can work both from home or office, I just prefer office for social reasons). Let's say I get hired by Basecamp, which is remote only with no office. I then claim that 'work from office' is my right because whatever. It's just a type of spoiled entitled brat that am. Now Basecamp or any other fully remote company is forced to rent an office just for me and maybe a few others who also share inclination to work from the office. Meanwhile, there are a ton of 'office vacancies' out there that I could have easily applied to given my background. How is it fair to Basecamp?
The older I get the more I believe in Cliff Stoll’s vision of education - one without technology. Zoom is convenient but it sucks the life out of learning.