The headline seems incorrect: it's a return-to-office rule, not a return-to-work rule. The employees were already working.
In the era of increased WFH (and during 2020-2021 even mandatory WFH) conflating the two terms is an anachronism - and in this case, it's also a subtle weasel wording to diminish WFH.
But you do you. We all have our bugaboos.
We were discussing the "return to work" vs "return to office" thing. Nobody mentioned anything about house maintenance being "women's work" or dismissed its importance before you brought it up accusing us of that.
If anything, in your first comment you dimissed the protesting about the title's "return to work" muddying the waters to make even paid work as something that only happens in an office.
Got it. Learned that a really long time ago, actually.
Here's the whole history of the thread:
djur: title is wrong, it's about return-to-office, not return-to-work
u: no problem with it, "work" is a place, not an activity.
me: work as synonumous with office, is an anachronism from when work was mostly done in an office. TFA title also anti-WFH weaseling.
u: As a former homemaker, I generally find it offensive that "work" means paid work and "women's work" is routinely implicitly devalued as not really work.
In your first comment you found it OK for work to mean "office" in TFA title, as if WFH is not work.
But suddenly you find it offensive that work doesn't also include not just WFH but also home chores.
U-turn much? And based on "But you do you" am I wrong to take this as an ad-hominem because I dared to reply to you, based on something unrelated to the discussion, which nor I not anybody in this subthread touched upon anyway?
>Got it. Learned that a really long time ago, actually.
Yes, it's all about you.
Former homemakers have issues it's nigh impossible to discuss at all anywhere. But I think that's a mistake that harms ongoing efforts to reform what work means to humans and when, where and how it can be validly performed.
As for home-related tasks, those are not "women's work" either, as they can be performed by men or women or even robot assistants, they're not paid work. They're also of course performed by themselves by most people living alone, anyway, and they're usually still not considered work in the business sense unless they involve paid staff. Asking a person living alone "what you do for work" they aren't going to mention that they do the dishes and wipe the floor at home, they're going to mention their Uber gig or cubicle job.
I couldn’t imagine some interpreting it that literally. A quick google search between the two, they’re virtually synonymous.
Language has connotations that influence how we interpret others' arguments.
For example, if I went to lunch with a colleague and had to get back to the office for a meeting or to get back to my computer. Or if I was at an off-site meeting that just ended and I was going to trek back to the office.
I don't say it much anymore, as WFH has cut all this needless commuting from my life, but I use to say that constantly.
It makes sense why those workers would seek to form a union; it sounds like management is really belittling their work, even through the language they feed to the press.
In the era of increasing "working from home" and working remotely from cafes and elsewhere, mixing the two is an anachronism that should stop. It also diminishes WFH.
You also would not say "I am going back to work" when you were sales person visiting customer, you would say "I am going back to office".
You would say "I am going back to work" when you would be on a lunch break as much as you would say "I am going back to office".
In work-from-home situation I see only "I am going back to office" as correct statement. With all implications of "going back to work" pointing out you are not "working" at moment you are talking.
it works better if you don’t stop and think about it. definitely works better if you don’t search about it.