The federal government encourages remote working, and has for many years. Why? Because the D.C. Beltway is a congested clusterf#!$, and keeping people off the roads who don't absolutely need to be makes the commute better for everyone.
Better for car pollution, better for urban house prices, better for the cost of gas, better for families/kids, and better for rural communities (as people move out of cities, and take their relatively high salaries/disposable income with them).
It does cause a short term shift as downtown support businesses (e.g. coffee shops, food, etc) have to move closer to where people live. But that is largely a return to what was normal 50 years ago anyway.
Fix:: ... the ego of BAD managers
I read some studies from a decade before COVID about remote work, and the upshot was that teams under previously under-performing managers indeed performed worse, but the previously higher-performing teams performed better.
Makes sense because bad managers manage to the signs of work, not work itself - it the but in the chair, not talking to someone else, etc., whereas the good managers manage to their targets and DGAF about the signs.
Send the poor manager's teams remote, and now they not only lack direction on real goals, but now they're also free of being hounded. Send the top managers' teams remote, and they have the same guidance, but less time and effort squandered commuting, less office interruptions, etc, and they improve.
Considering the studies and recent experience, I'd almost consider it a test of a manager's skill - if they cannot manage a remote team productively, they cannot manage a local one.
(Of course meanwhile, the right wing has gone fully into abusive leader attitude over any facts, and so squanders Congress' time with nonsense like this. Ugh)
(Edit: typo)
But if I barely drive ever, and work entirely remote, is it so bad to live in a suburb? Genuinely wondering.
The problem is most US towns and suburbs are not set up to be core walkable, dense places, where you don’t even need a car to get home. There are exceptions (I can think of some Hudson Valley towns on train stations, where their core has mixed use multi-story attached housing), but that’s not the norm and is generally discouraged via zoning.
Although with package deliveries, the impact is amortized by all the packages so the impact is probably less than if I had driven to the store, this isn't true of grocery and food deliveries. Those are about as inefficient as would be if I did that driving myself.
The approach of thinking about suburbs/city/etc will all have to account for the new hybrid lifestyle of remote work now – where people are living in remote areas but still not driving that much either.
Less-dense housing strongly tends to be less-green than denser housing, commute or no commute. The differences are extreme enough that yeah, it's pretty close to being that cut and dry.
Your last point does have a pretty big caveat, in that widespread strict residential zoning outright prohibits almost every kind of useful support business from setting up shop close enough to where many people live (that is, in the suburbs).
The answer to this, of course, is "so let's get rid of that hopelessly strict zoning, which is bad for a host of other reasons, too", not "so remote work is still the problem".
I disagree, they're playing into their base well from a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality perspective.
Much of their base associates remote working with pandemic measures, which they believe were unnecessary and exaggerated. They associate the types of jobs that can be done remotely as jobs belonging to "coastal elites"/liberal tech workers/pampered college grads/government employees who belong to the swamp/etc. Those exist in contrast to the perceived base of "real" workers, whose jobs are likely physical and can't be done remotely, and who feel strongly about pandemic mitigations. Their response to workers who are hesitant to work in-person is that "the pandemic is over, it's time to go back to work", and workers who want to remain remote are painted as lazy, insubordinate and entitled parasites.
In effect, this bill is hurting the "right" people and there are plenty of constituents who want to use the legal system to do just that: stick it to the people they don't like. Taking away privileges from government employees does exactly that.
I disagree...this bill is hurting the "right" people and there are plenty of constituents who want to use the legal system to do just that: stick it to the people they don't like.
This reads to me more like an elaboration on the above rather than a disagreement with it. After all, the "right people" being hurt are, in fact, American workers.
It's fine to hurt people, so long as we're hurting the right people.
Ref:
> Crab mentality, also known as crab theory,[1][2] crabs in a bucket (also barrel, basket, or pot) mentality, or the crab-bucket effect, is a way of thinking best described by the phrase "if I can't have it, neither can you".[3]
> The metaphor is derived from anecdotal claims about the behavior of crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape,[4] the claim is its efforts will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise.[5][6][7]
> The analogous theory in human behavior is that members of a group will attempt to reduce the self-confidence of any member who achieves success beyond the others, out of envy, jealousy, resentment, spite, conspiracy, or competitive feelings, to halt their progress.[8][9][10][11] The same claims about behaviour are embodied in the phrase tall poppy syndrome.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
From the §See also:
> He observed a self-interested, family-centric society, which sacrificed the public good for the sake of nepotism and the immediate family. As an American, Banfield was witnessing what was to become infamous as the Southern Italian Mafias and a self-centered clan-system promoting the well-being of their inner group at the expense of the other ones. Banfield postulated that the backwardness of such a society could be explained "largely but not entirely" by "the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family."[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_...
My experience in flyover republican country is that anything that makes a government agency worse, or makes a government worker less happy is good, because it can help bolster the private industry alternative (but complaining about the private alternatives, or wait times at government buildings is perfectly okay).
And that's at best! For many, the cruelty of making their perceived opponent less happy (without any benefit to oneself) is sufficient motivation for them to support policy. Policy as a tool to "hurt people"[1].
1: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
Possibly part of the envy is the disparity in wage visibility. Nobody knows how much people make in the private sector, whereas government salaries are a matter of public record, and can seem high relative to a sub-living-wage job, while also having "cadillac" benefits, reasonable job security, and comfortable working conditions.
I've read (and probably seen) that there are large regions of the Midwest where the only towns with any appreciable prosperity either have a college or a hospital, or both.
Blue-collar workers without the option of working remote may perceive working for home differently than we do. Not saying it's close to correct. Just that the politics of this bill make sense.
Their motivations, however misplaced and due to misunderstandings, are about fairness, justice and functioning government. The simple truth is that, to many Americans, the idea of "working from home" means "not really working".
They believe that people in the office will do real work, whereas those same people at home won't. It's a wrong and harmful worldview, but it's not malicious or coming from a place of contempt. A solid "never attribute to malice ..." moment.
This is an ironically contemptuous view. One, five hundred dollars isn’t nothing. Two, that doesn’t include lodging, meals, et cetera, all of which make visiting a city prohibitively expensive for many American families.
This rarely breeds empathy the way travel (or fiction) does.
It doesn't have to cost anything to learn. One just has to stop deliberately choosing to learn falsehoods.
Wait no, we shouldn't do that because it's childish and stupid.
Sorry if /s and sorry if not. They do have special work which by definition is in two locations.
[0]https://www.propublica.org/article/the-dog-ate-my-vote-how-c...
In the D.C. area, that's true. When we were moved out of the area, more than five years ago, one of the first things we were told was that we would not be able to telework as often as we had. When the pandemic it, we went to essentially full-time telework; but, we've been back in the office three or four days a week for a year and a half.
The American government worker in particular. They've spent decades repeating Reagan's line: “The top 9 most terrifying words in the English Language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Government workers are the enemy, and they want to ensure that they're maximally ineffective so that they can remain the enemy.
Is this surprising? Seems completely on brand.