Australians fight for the right to work from home permanently
reuters.com
reuters.com
> Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare earlier than before the pandemic.
The example here seems like a particularly stupid (from the company POV, even) place to put an in-office mandate. Clearly much of the actual work was never happening in the office anyway.
Overall what the article describes seems pretty similar to what's happening in a lot of companies in the US (and globally, as the article notes), though with more unions involved than in the US. Bosses are much more likely to want 5 days in the office than employees, negotiation over how many days, etc. A lot of work certainly doesn't need 5 days a week in office.
Also I hate being at home. Nothing good ever happens there.
Aren’t we talking about private businesses here?
But it doesn't need to be every day, and I also have non-work obligations that are often far easier to accomplish during the week if there's some flexible time.
I'm truly sorry to hear that. :-\
The majority of people where, exactly? Your comment doesn't seem context-aware.
In my case (Buenos Aires, IT work) it used to be the case that people all over the city and surrounding areas had to commute to the city's "microcenter" (what we call the financial/historical district), resulting in typical commute times of 1 to 2 hours. Dreadful.
So your statement doesn't ring true for us in Buenos Aires.
What statistics are you working with to support your point about planet Earth?
Really, you know this for all 3 million people?
It seems that you have some issues going on, no need to drag your colleagues into that.
Doubly or triply so considering the travel times to their field sites, just look at the timeframe differences quoted for that office meeting vs when he leaves for the survey site otherwise. What an incredible gain in productivity!
That means if you want me in the office, I will leave my house at 9AM, if you want me to be close to the office, then increase my pay and I will move closer.
(I don't actually want to do this, but when writing government policies, you have to consider that some people will be aggressively adversarial if it suits them.)
I have certainly worked with more than one person at my workplace who started when they lived locally, but eventually moved to the big city over an hour away, while retaining their employment with the business even after settling into their new home. Them suddenly working 2+ fewer hours each day would be a significant change to their employment.
If the time is set in stone at the time of first hire, then I guess you're incentivized to move as far away as possible that still allows you to be hired, and then on your second day move in next door?
So now you need a tribunal to verify the claims, and what do they go on? With respect to a parallel thread, do the people with the right machining equipment in their garage get to do their manufacturing job at home? If I have a kitchen, can't the Uber Eats driver pick up the food at my place?
Or is the law only carved out for senior web developers specifically?
This is would have a bunch of perverse outcomes you probably haven’t considered. Employers would immediately start to consider the commute times of candidates before hiring them. Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing. Which would in turn correlate to discrimination against the ethnic groups that are over represented in those lower socioeconomic groups.
It’s basically only a good idea if you’re trying to intentionally constrain social mobility.
Now do college degrees.
This already happens, and AFAIK it's not a protected class. "Hmm, they'd be driving an hour each direction, are they likely to stick around?"
That's already a thing in Australia.
> Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing.
The current system already does that also. Poorer people are traveling more for work, but they aren't getting compensated for the commute time.
I think a strong case can be made for this. For those of us lucky enough to be able to negotiate salaries, we absolutely should be pricing that time into the rates we're negotiating for.
Bigger picture, I've always thought it was insane that we talk about "40 hour workweeks" as if they exist. Realistically, the time it takes me to commute is part of my workday. If my commute takes an hour each way, then I'm working a 50 hour workweek.
EDIT: To be clear. I mean "forcing people to do anything different". Going into the office was normal for almost everyone.
Since always? Until Covid, there was no choice. People did it because they had to. Covid just reminded people that there is another way to live and how much quality of life they're actually sacrificing for their job.
That said, there's no question that I personally am much more productive at home vs in the office. Offices seem designed to interfere with productivity.
But, all that said, why does it matter either way? I am a human being. I do not exist to ensure that my employer is operating with the greatest productivity possible.
You literally do if you are employed by someone. You expect money from them in exchange for productive work. You are free to start your own business if you want to be however-productive you feel like that day.
For head-down productivity, sure, you can be better at home. But that's not the entire picture, is it?
In-person collaboration is always better than remote messaging/video calling. It just is, and probably always will be.
It's very disingenuous to pretend remote collaboration is anywhere near as effective as in-person collaboration.
No. You're paid to deliver productive work, not to ensure you're working on the greatest productivity possible at all times. That's a fool's errand, eventually bringing you guilt when you can't perform at that level due to life's twists and turns, turning into a burnout when you aren't able to keep your productivity at 100% but keep trying (and failing). If you are employed by someone there's an expectation of doing your job, delivering value, not of chasing the greatest productivity possible. You are a person, not a fucking machine. Balance is needed to be constantly productive, to be able to be creative.
> In-person collaboration is always better than remote messaging/video calling. It just is, and probably always will be.
> It's very disingenuous to pretend remote collaboration is anywhere near as effective as in-person collaboration.
It is very myopic to state platitudes without any data to support your main argument, based on some "it just is". It might be for you and your colleagues, it might not be that important for a lot of people/processes that adapted to not be in-person.
Stop trying to force others to live how you think people should live, you do you, let others decide what's best for them.
Extremes edges of the space of possibility aren't that interesting, but if you want greater compensation, you probably do want to find ways to deliver greater value for your company (and make sure they know about it).
It's very hard for a company to continue paying out greater compensation to employees than the value delivered by those employees.
Your horizon for "always" is myopic.
This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.
Less concentrated human habitation is not without cost…
Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.
The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.
Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero.
Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine.
They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities.
That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class.
>If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.
There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered.
In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby.
Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.
I know someone who does Den Haag-Amsterdam every day but he's Japanese so he is trained in the art of salary man.
The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes.
Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.
If that ever gets developed, it will revolutionize the world.
Also, some jobs were moved online during COVID (eg. teaching) but it is clearly demonstrated that they work better in person.
Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.
Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.
...or more effectively, by abandoning the flawed concept of single-family zoning, thereby allowing market forces to increase housing supply where it is needed.
I've had coworkers who lived and worked in Beijing without cars - they still had 40+ minute each direction commutes. And that's a city that was extremely aggressive in expanding its transit. It's just a basic queuing/graph problem, though.
If people only make cases for transit by straw-manning the worst part of cars and ignoring the worst part of mass transit it's gonna take a long time to convince enough people to spend the billions needed to make it happen, since most people aren't stupid and they know that there are cons of public transit too, not just unalloyed pros.
Different parts of US, Australia, or Europe will respond differently even when subjected to the same policy. So I don't think any one answer is correct as a general rule.
I don't think cities are actually out of room. Maybe they are, but it's not obvious to me that this is the case.
> Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win.
Not for the people who live in smaller towns because they prefer living in smaller towns.
> And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.
Not all small towns are poor. And regardless, a lot of people with money coming into a town very often causes prices for everything (especially housing) to increase, pricing poor people out of the area. And if you're poor, you probably can't afford to move elsewhere.
Not saying that these problems are inevitable, but there are certainly lots of examples of them happening. What I am saying is that this is a very complicated thing with no clear outcome for any particular place.
USA Population growth rate is now at about the lowest it has ever been. All the previous generations had to also build houses and the supporting infrastructure. It's not rocket science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
Remote work allows people that work in exporting services to live anywhere. They bring cash into the economy, and any town with a good sense of economics should be trying to bring those people in. Might they temporarily raise prices in the town they move to? Yeah, but they moving out of a big city also lowers prices in that big city, what about the folks that were outpriced there, and now might have some breathing room?
Wow. This is the opposite of the US where most small towns have depressed real estate values and negative growth rates. What is Australia doing differently?
During COVID some people left the biggest cities to live somewhere without lockdowns. This was a fairly small number in absolute terms but it pushed prices up in specific desirable local market and really stretched services. That's slowly reversing now.
This is happening everywhere. My hometown in Europe is by the sea and has nice weather. Since remote work, housing has become ridiculous, both in price and availability. Locals can hardly afford it anymore. But I do think this whole situation will balance out eventually, we're really just at the beginning of a new global trend.
So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.)
But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options.
In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).
It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition.
Of course, there's also a selection effect; more interesting things to spend money on causes people to spend more money. (That's why people who earn more per hour tend to work more, not less.)
Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world: the dense cities are more in demand and more expensive than the middle of nowhere.
If nobody can build "enough housing" in their cities, to make their cities as cheap as their rural land, I think that tells us something. We can' simply take demand entirely out of the picture, since adding more supply is both (a) a lagging process and (b) a process that itself helps promote more demand by necessitating more service business, more jobs at those businesses, etc. I.e., if you make the land more attractive to everyone, everyone who wants to use that land for their business or residence has more competition for securing a spot on it.
This is a great observation, if a problem is occurring all over the place maybe the solution isn't simple.
The cool stuff in these cities is highly centralized and just building more housing a little further out doesn't spread it automatically.
If you build a high rise apartment tower in Yonkers it might not sell. Move much loser to Manhattan and you run into all the problems of building in an area that's already pretty dense.
Maybe cities are just more productive economically, so people earn more, so they can pay more.
I think where having more housing helps though is making your city more diverse. If you have fancy housing for doctors and grungy housing for artists, your city will have a better art scene than if you only have fancy housing.
If you're in a city that's doing well, you have a lot of residents with money to spend. Enough to incentivize a lot of development aimed at those residents. But that jut further chokes out anything that would only serve those with incomes in the lowest percentiles.
Building housing helps, certainly, but there's a differnence between "building housing that keeps the growth engine running" and "building housing that keeps the bottom-tier population served and keeps people from being pushed into homelessness" (especially when redevelopment is financially most practical in cheaper parts of town which can cause more displacement of more economically precarious people - replacing that grungy housing, for instance), and I don't think market-based approaches will ever be enough since the financial incentives to serve the bottom of the market naturally are much smaller than to serve the middle or the top. And I think this is demonstrated by how the densest first-world-cities across the world often have affordability issues.
Grungy housing was new fancy housing - decades ago.
I guess if the government is willing to build Soviet style grey blocks then you can have new but modest, relatively cheap housing.
But the "just build more" path of least resistance is to bulldoze today's grungy housing to build tomorrow's new housing, and most of the time that doesn't make it easy for the existing displaced residents find enough replacement grungy housing at rates they can afford.
So I think there needs to be something more than just laissez-faire building.
Although if they were homeowners before, they probably didn't mind selling their house, seeing as they did it.
Some physical factors that might matter are underlying land value, single stair laws and similar things making building layout worse, how many 1br vs 3br units there are… not whether it looks old or not though.
You can't identify affordable (subsidized) housing from the outside in cities where it exists.
Tokyo is the main example that isn't in this situation.
Conversely, companies will sometimes locate themselves in suburbs just to make it harder for employees to leave. IIRC that's why IBM is in Armonk.
Some people like living in big cities, usually because they're young and starry eyed about the "possibilities" of them being interesting. Quite often they grow out of this, and get to hate the big cities and their stress and uglyness....
[0] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filez...
At various times it's been train, bus, cycling, walking.
When people are allowed to live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best, most expensive cities.
*for some particular jobs
That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace.
There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks.
So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation.
So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation.
Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.
personally I wouldn't work from an office so would basically skip on applying to those places but that is the excuse I've heard most often
More realistically many only know "asses in seats" as a metric for their employees working.
The same is true for most office jobs. It might appear to happen in the office, but that's because computers and desks are in the office.
One of the nagging questions/worries I have about the increase in WFH is greener employees. I've entertained summer interns for the last 11 years at work. And I've tried to help some older but newer-to-programming peers.
I can take "experienced" contractors/helpers up to speed in one of the many domains I have to work in pretty quick. Share some code. Some chats/emails. Couple desktop shares, it's usually enough to bootstrap an ongoing remote conversation.
With younger/newer/greener people, I have found this to be nigh impossible though. I don't like the optics of "you need to get some experience before you can work from home" and it also begs the question "who's going to show up in office to do the mentoring." I do see this as a problem that's not getting addressed.
It basically lets you pair program where you and a remote person can control your computer (or theirs) more or less completely and seamlessly. There are competing products too, but that was the nicest I've used.
I tried it at my new job with a colleague in Brazil (I'm in US) and the performance was awful as it seemed to be routing it through the VPN for some reason.
My point is though, good pair programming software might be the solution. Zoom is inadequate in my professional opinion, though it's almost viable. Knowing how much better it could be it falls short.
>Just have the person who doesn’t understand what they’re doing revert their network settings perfectly across N esoteric config files for shell, npm, brew, gradle, cocoapods, the system itself, the video chat client itself perhaps, etc etc etc
IT departments can’t predict every build environment, and not every build environment is containerized.
The whole "juniors need easy help and struggle to get it themselves" seems like an artificially concocted narrative to me.
Edit: fixed a word
However that's somewhat misleading, the "productivity" does NOT mean physics-style efficiency of human effort to create value and fight entropy... No, it's based on what employers had to spend. So slaves that only produce a quarter as much per day are technically "more productive."
This matters because employers that require unnecessary time/fuel for commutes typically don't pay for it. Out of tradition and negotiating-power, those costs are usually shoved off onto employees and are not being tracked.
If commuting to the office was compensated, the "productivity" differences with work-from-home would be dramatically flipped.
[0] Example: https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productiv...
God I hate Thursdays at the office, too many meetings, day broken in a bajillion pieces, and I can't get anything done.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
The unexplored outcome of hybrid is that there's no such thing as hybrid.
In a hybrid model, you come into the office and find people sitting in chairs with a headphone on. Because they're just as much in calls as they were at home. Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there.
Hence, this nice physical face-to-face meeting, a supposed benefit of returning to the office, does not materialize.
Well, perhaps you'll at least do some ad-hoc brainstorming with your colleague at the coffee machine. Sure, but you need to put the outcome of that in writing...for the people that are not there.
Hence, this mode of virtual working cannot be undone. You can't do a "little" virtual working. When you come into the office you largely continue to work as if from home. Perhaps without the sweatpants.
For the record, I'm not anti-office. I enjoy the socializing, lunch walks, etc. And in our increasingly touchless home-based society, it's not that bad of a deal to get out of the house for 2 or 3 days a week. Finally, we should empathize with juniors. In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing.
That's not the only possible "hybrid" model though. The one where multiple large companies (or company-like divisions) are time-sharing the same facility, so that for any workday it's either 100% of the group present or 0% of the group present.
I'm not saying it'll prove practical or popular, but it does avoid the "there's always somebody missing from the meeting" issue.
This is very true. Probably the biggest contributor to my career were the first two internships I have had. I can't imagine having them done virtually over Slack and Zoom and still having the same impact and connection, it would be devoid of an essential sense of belonging and inspiration.
With the penalty of wasted time on commuting.
It does in my experience. 1 on 1s and small meetings often do have all of the attendees present, especially when in-office days are designated. Some meetings do have people attending virtually, but a good conference room setup with large screens and good interfaces for conferencing make it more comfortable than being stuck in front of your computer. Regardless, you are in the room with many people face-to-face, and you can discuss things with them after the meeting and build relationships.
I see your point, because sometimes I have to find a room in the office just to have a 1:1 virtually, which arguably is more of a hassle than just taking the call at home. But I do find that hybrid works well overall in my experience, and the interpersonal benefits are large even though not everyone is in the office at the same time.
The issue of which-3-days is real though.
A bigger issue is the asymmetry in the system - new people get a net benefit from facetime and mentoring. Experienced employees get net loss. It's distraction, unproductive time for your own projects, unrecognized at review time.
And since experienced employees have more clout, mentoring can become a negligible part of the new employees experience. Even at companies that claim to have made a system of mentoring, stories abound of failures ('mentors' that ignore questions or requests for meeting)
The type of argument
> It's hypocritical that they [group A] are the ones doing [some thing] but at the same time also being the ones [group B] doing [another thing]
with groups A and B being independent of each other often irks me. Who says they are actually the same people? What is this line of thought called, that must be a named fallacy of some kind.
Again, I just want to know what the fallacy is called.
Edit: Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition?
The problem with presuppositions is that they are preserved under negation. Whether you say you are for or against right Y, it seems that you presuppose that right Y exists in some capacity. But that's not what people who are "against" would want to assume, as they are probably denying it.
I'm not arguing against you, but you're giving the technical, logical explanation to a purposely a-technical and a-logical claim. The vast majority of people (not the ones who think like you or me) simply call the use of force against other people in order to get what they want (the social order they want, etc) "rights", whatever the moral implications (or even practical consequences).
Working remote has let me live and travel wherever I want. I’m planning a three to six month working vacation to Asia / Australia for near the end of the year. I currently live in a cheap cost of living location, with extremely low taxes, near family, and work in a high salary location. Best of all worlds.
So many companies now have policies that restrict where you work from for tax/payroll purposes, or because they don't want employees working in country where the employee doesn't have the proper visa (even if working for a US company).
That's the real reason why WFH faces so much resistance. When people are done with their work they can just play with their kid or do what they want, and it becomes obvious how much, using Foucault's analogy, of a prison aimed to discipline the office is.
As far as I can tell the real reasons are some combination of:
* Working physically next to people generally is more efficient. Of course there are some people like Knuth who need to be undisturbed for 6 hours, but for most people the ease of communicating in the real world is a big time saver. It really is.
* The benefit of face to face meetings is bigger the more meetings you have and the more talking to people your job involves. Guess how many meetings the people making these decisions have...
* You're less likely to spend time doing house chores and whatever. I generally do a solid day's work when WFH but even I sometimes just mow the lawn or whatever. If I was at work I would probably just read HN on my phone instead but I obviously hide that better. So this isn't a good reason IMO but it is a reason.
* Companies don't like paying for fancy offices that nobody is using.
* It isn't the company that pays for the time and cost of your commute, so to them that is not a downside.
I wouldn't ever work for a company that didn't let me WFH again. The lack of commute is just too good.
But I do understand the real reasons why high up managers don't like it.
No one is forcing them to? That sounds like an argument for WFH, not against.
I expect new companies will probably avoid getting large offices though.
Some of that time even working with gasp Indians.
If your company is working with a contracting/consulting company (eg. Infosys, TCS) then you're not paying enough. Most of those consulting/contracting firms are trying to pay $3-8k/yr when market rate at Product Driven Companies across India is $20-50k/yr now.
Even farming pays around $3-8k/yr (especially when factoring that farm income isn't taxed in India).
Plenty of American companies are fine paying the true market rate (eg. With returnees from America, Canada, Germany, SG, etc) and haven't had those kinds of issues.
This assumes that all the talent in the world has a cheaper, equally skilled counterpart in India. This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages?
1. Living far away from your entire family sucks. You'll miss birthdays, weddings, funerals, and plenty of wholesome moments with family
2. The talent doesn't really leave India anymore. Product companies (both MNCs and Local) can pay $20-50k/yr now in India, which is roughly comparable to the rest of Eurasia.
Working at top Western companies like Amazon, Google, MS, Oracle, etc means that your mid-career TC can hit $60-80k/yr.
3. Depending on the industry, this shift has already happened. In the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Cloud space, other than the main CSPs, most hiring of talent is now in Israel and India due to the lack of training in kernel development, OS, networking, DBs, etc at American universities.
Working in Cybersecurity for the past 6 years, based in the US.
What you say is nowhere near accurate, and the reason why the landscape is still quite green in the US is simply because money.
Our entire agent team is now split across Eastern Europe, Israel, and India for this very reason.
P.S. We were offering market rate (TC $200-300k/yr) before calling it quits and hiring in Eastern Europe/Israel/India for a TC of $60-110k/yr.
But of course you could easily find cheaper engineers somewhere else, you are looking at a pool of people two or three times larger after all.
We also outsourced to Israel, India, and Ukraine, between 2012 and 2018. The final outcome was to dismantle all the operations there, move some to Mexico, and repatriate most of the work to the US.
The talent pool just doesn't seem as deep anymore in the US despite us offering pretty good salaries.
At this point we were able to get US level engineering talent outside the US and I don't see us turning back, especially now that stsrtups like Wiz, Orca, etc are further enhancing the talent pool for our needs plus VMWare, Cisco, and Symantec/Broadcom's layoffs bringing us plenty of skilled engineers who returned back to the home country.
In the context of tech, this is true in general.
> This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages?
You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws. To give you an example, last week 7000 students from just one Indian state left for Canada. They rented an entire stadium to throw themselves a big farewell party. H1B visa lottery has only 85K spots in USA but is subscribed by around 300K folks. Out of which around 200K are Indians trying to come to /settle in USA.
When canada created a special work permit for digital nomads who have h1b visa over 10K Indians applied for it matter of 48 hours.
There is a quit India movement among Indian workers.
If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market. It is not, thus it cannot be true.
> You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws.
So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries?
If you knew anything about immigration law, you would understand that these two are mutually exclusive. Indians in the US or Canada will not be paid the same rates as in India.
> If you[r] job can be done 100% remotely it can also be done in India.
In context of that let me examine your points:
> If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market.
For many cases it already is. A ton of tech work has *already* moved to India making their US branches primarily sales offices. But as I said, not all work can be outsourced to India. A lot of it must happen in offices in USA. This work is often high value, high collaboration work, as many companies including Google and Meta have figured, 100% remote hurts their competitive edge, reduces innovation and hurts collaborative problem solving. Not all jobs need this and all those jobs can be 100% remote but they will eventually move to India or someplace else where they can be cheaper.
> So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries?
I never made such strong claim, my claim was limited to remote jobs only. Yes, every remote job that pays well can move to some other region where someone will do it better than you for a lower pay. It is not a west v/s India but that is how markets function. Indians do hire a lot of western world people for things they are cheaper for example translation and content generation.
People are useful resource and jobs are not a zero sum game. When your remote job goes to India you don't become worthless, you rather find a job that is better suited for your skills and situation making your economy more resilient and efficient.
My broader point however is that if you are living in one of those high cost areas like Silicon Valley or NYC or Sydney and if your employer is okay with you being 100% remote, trust me that you wont have that job for long.
Big companies negotiate large tax breaks from city and state governments in exchange for bringing a certain number of jobs to the area. But big companies haven't been delivering the jobs to the area that they promised because employees have been allowed to work remotely. So now they are at risk of huge tax bills.
It makes sense that workers would want it, just like they would want a 200% higher salary. Individuals with leverage or those in unions can negotiate for it and employers can come to agreements or not.
I suppose it wouldn't be a huge stretch from current policy for the government to make employers pay workers for their commute time, because it already does similar things, but this is all for our early workers.
However, companies with just choose to hire workers that were closer because distance to your job isn't a protected class like race or gender
I've gotten two invitations to emigrate in the past and although I naively refused, as time goes on I am strongly inclined to at least take the offers into account.
Unionization helps develop somewhat of a brotherhood to keep the nastiness at bay, but even then the members generally want to keep it an exclusive club, not something for all workers to join. As a result even union members still see external pressure from the workers outside of the union still trying to them screw over.
No, being comprised of humans, it absolutely doesn’t.
Both are extremely privileged and ignorant positions.
That nobody would work 70 hour weeks, and that going into an office is a comparable struggle.
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/reasons-to-take-the-...
if a company decides they function best with all their employees in the same physical space, and hires with that condition as an explicit criteria for working there, do you really think that's a violation of human rights?
People down there, let's say, do not exactly live to work. You can say that's how it ought to be, and you might well be right, but that's how it's always been. YMMV.
Unions and the importance of labor were largely accepted a century ago. Compare Marx's Labor Theory of Value [2] to this quote from Abraham Lincoln [3]:
> Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
What we've seen in recent times is the capital-owning class just coming out and saying the quiet part out loud. Crushing working from home is just another way of extracting even more surplus value from labor.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would literally melt you into bio-matter if there was an uptick in profits. They would starve you and put you out on the street if there was an uptick in profits. I hope more people realize this. Stop defending billionaires.
[1]: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/bi...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
[3]: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-messa...
All of these argument about WFH seem to assume a job's real requirements should be something different.
A good example is people talk about companies wanting in person work to drive their real-estate value, ect.
The obvious answer is "OK, so thats the job they are paying you for"
Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely. Employment is a negotiation, not edict from nobility. Maybe you have to prove the job can't be done remotely as an employer. That is a reasonable requirement.
Unions makes total sense, but not regulation or law.
If a company wants to pay a worker to stand idle in a building to drive up realestate value, that should not be a question of law or regulation.
>Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely.
This is already reverting to the assumtion that the "job" is something different than what the employer dictates. Part of the job can be to meet in person.
Having to prove the job cant be done remotely is already redifinging "the job" as something other than what the employer wants. Who exactly is running the company here?
I do however understand that some people think the role of the government is to just be a big labor union
Back in the day in Europe, there was an air controller strike where the media tried to frame it as a bunch of entitled, overpaid assholes, ruining holidays for everybody. It was disheartening to see how many actually fell for that message, asking why someone should make over 100k euro a year, instead of questioning why they themselves were making so little.
I'm all for work from home, I think it's actually worth a pay decrease[1], but this quote is a form of double dipping. Presumably Coomber didnt take a pay cut when the pandemic began and they started working from home. I guess it depends on the circumstances during offer/negotiations. That being said, most US contracts more or less say the employer can change your job duties to whatever they want, without any requirement to change your pay. That could include coming to the office, working longer hours, and cleaning the toilets -- if they can get away with it.
As far as I know the primary tool by which workers have caused meaningful changes in the workplace are 1) Negotiations on initial offer and 2) Refusing to continue to work for an employer under terms that are no longer their BATNA .
[1]: I think its actually a mutually beneficial arrangement, at least for me and many of my colleagues we're simply more able to contribute -- from focus, quiet, being able to spend commute time working (reduced stress) etc. The employer is getting a better worker with less office space overhead. Naturally this is highly variable to the job, a work from home ER nurse probably doesnt make sense. But for many it does.