I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps salt in the wound, if you will.
Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.
Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.
On the other hand, anybody that works in a cubical and mostly deals with a phone/computer could probably easily expect that they would be able to work from home. Many of those jobs have fairly modest pay. And I think if you have that aspiration to work from home, you would probably still be a little annoyed about the inability to work from home, regardless of the pay. But I agree there is likely a price where one would be fine with letting that dream stay a dream.
I feel that the far greater problem is that employers are now painting this neat picture where it's employees vs employees in this dilemma over inequality. Foreshadowing that it may be something they need to bother to step in the middle of in the near future. When in reality we are fairly united against employers in their seeming lack of willingness to just treat all of their employees well. Speaking generally of course.
I think especially for forklift drivers and alike - this is about to change. With teleoperating semi autonomous machinery, most of these jobs could be then remote as well. But it will take some time as currently humans and simple forklifts are way cheaper.
I can remember in 2010 or so having two friends who worked from home - one doing generic helpdesk in a small apartment, and one doing medical coding in a trailer. Neither paid well at all, and never did I get this sense of jealousy. Perhaps their lives were easier because of it, but it was far from the giant sun lit home offices people seem to imagine.
I also think a lot about how retail has changed. As a child, you had actual sales people in a lot of places who seemed happy to help. Probably on commission. Even the non-commissioned jobs people didn't seem so miserable. Probably because the wage gap wasn't as huge as it is today. So many people I encounter seem bothered by my presence and genuinely miserable, I try to avoid even going to stores anymore. It's a lose lose lose situation.
Of course, I have no answers for any of this, just observations from a middling age man.
You might just not be one of these people. For some people, the feeling of being on your way to work is an existential dread. Or like you're leaving your life behind to live a different one that you don't generally enjoy for a while. Some of those people would likely do anything to avoid that feeling. I think for those people, working from home is epic. You get to go to work every day on what feels more like your terms and your life, whatever that life may be. Instead of molding myself into the image of my work environment every day, I can mold my workplace more into myself. Feeding me into:
> but it was far from the giant sun lit home offices people seem to imagine.
For some people, the ideal working conditions are a dimly lit basement, believe it or not.
> [The generally unhappy state of front line workers yesteryear and this one.]
Just 10 years ago, I was working front lines at a Super Target, making 15 cents above my state's minimum wage, which amounted to something like $8.50/hour. I'm in general a fairly.. well "stoic" might be the nicer word.. person, so faking a smile for the sake of a stranger's comfort would have cost me more in energy than my employer was paying me, if that makes sense. That's not to say I'm a jerk to people on purpose, by any means. But if I'm in a bad mood because I left for work at 4:30AM to make barely more than enough for a room to rent, peanut butter sandwiches, and my cell phone bill, it would have been difficult to summon the strength. This is mostly just to say that I agree with your observation, but I empathize more with the employees than the customers who feel they were under-helped.
Observations from someone who will be entering the middling ages soon.
This happens over and over and now a workforce that’s too ambivalent to be productively helpful to customers experiences. Not even proactively in common sense ways. An example I’ve run into a couple time from quick service food joints goes like this. I order a fountain drink with my food. Pay, walk to drink machine that’s out of order. I ask clerk if there’s anything else to drink, they say no. I then ask why they sold me a fountain drink if they know machine is broken? I tell them I want a refund. They say they don’t know how. Takes 15 minutes and a manager to get the refund. As I’m waiting, cashier continues selling fountain drinks to customers in line.
You can find a hundred side effects of that - people who want to work in their underpants, not get ready for work, not shower, have a flexible schedule, etc., as individual 'inequalities.' If fixing the pay makes other complaints disappear, were they ever a primary factor?
FWIW, I do think the pendulum will shift in our lifetime. The 'You Call the Handyman' South Park really hit home for us, and I can totally see that now and even more in 20 or so years. Can you imagine needing something fixed in your house and trying to barter your skills? I sure can't!
i don't think this is the right question.
of course, if i get paid more, i am willing to put up with worse work conditions. (to a degree). so the mere fact that pay makes the problem go away is not an indicator that this was not a real problem.
more pay lets me compensate the problem otherwise. for example it may mean that me or my partner can reduce work hours instead of working from home.
What I’ve found is that mostly people work as hard as they care to, and that is mostly orthogonal to compensation and title.