To hate the Daily Mail and its anti WFH vendetta

[catsliketowearsocks]

There is yet another DM story doing the rounds today about people 'working from beach'. Apparently it's council worker this time rather than civil servants. I work for a council and we would not be able to live abroad as we have impromptu office meetings, but even if we wanted to for the short term (like, for a family emergency or flight issues) we would have to apply for permission due to cybersecurity rules.

The DM would like to ban WFH which is just nasty. There may be a small number who take the piss but I don't believe that's the norm. WFH has vastly improved my life and mental health.

I'm willing to bet many DM journalists work remotely.

It is also worth noting that the concerns about promotions etc, as well as not being relevant to all women anyway, have nothing other than hunches and at best a couple of years of the posters own workplace experience to back them up.

Insensitive about pensions? Really?

Is that your take from my post. Are we supposed to be grateful that we have a pension at all?

YABU for reading The Mail

I've had a career spanning decades. Do you really believe calculating your pension out now and again, pushing for promotion and moving on if you've come to the end of the road with the job you're in is irrelevant.

Have we really gone from barefoot, pregnant in the kitchen to, barefoot pregnant, WFH. Jakers!!

😂😂

The issue of promotion is certainly irrelevant for some women, yes. Quite why that led you to the barefoot and pregnant conclusion is for you to spell out.

As for the spanning decades part, the massive increase in remote working is only three and a half years old. There has been an utter sea change, and by definition nobody can have more than a couple of years of experience of this new normal. What happened back when remote working was a rarity doesn't tell us about what will happen now it isn't.

No they won't. They will complain about a lack of public services, which they will ascribe to lazy public service workers, not to two people trying to do the job of 3.

agree with them as said on twitter the golf course has never been so full! too many lazy folk got it too easy now since covid

Do you think perhaps some of them might be retired, rather than remote workers?

Our council bosses play golf in the next borough for this reason. 😂😂 The ones with boats on the marina are less likely to be spotted. With good wifi you can of course work in your second home/caravan, on your boat.

it was Charlie Mullins that mntioned the golf courses I have never played so not actually been on one but it makes a lot of sense

The real deal behind the hate for homeworking isn't just about offices, lattes and whatever else fits across the strapline of the Daily Mail. It's much more that it's actually empowered some people that aren't supposed to be empowered. Especially women. And that terrifies a whole strata of society that has devoted it's entire existence to keeping them in their place

yes that is my view as well

It just goes to show that people will fall for anything if you package it right and it suits the narrative they already believe.

Yes, of course, @jane1956 remote workers are all off to the golf courses every day. Of course.

As far as promotions go, I got promoted three times when I was working from home in the same company.

Guess how many times I got promoted working in the office for the same company? Zero.

WFH enabled me, a quieter personality, to shine as I was better able to interact with people via Teams. In the office, I was always quieter than others so it was easier for the louder, bigger and more extroverted personalities to take over. Yet, interacting virtually, gave me an opportunity to show what skills and knowledge that I had.

So, all those competency-building opportunities that I'd previously missed out on, came my way. So, it's not remotely true that people who WFH will be eliminated from promotion opportunities. It doesn't make a lick of sense-if a business is going either fully remote or even hybrid and they're looking to promote internally-they're going to be choosing from a pool of people who WFH.

Also, not every employer promotes on who sucks up to the boss most or who is most visible in the office. Some actually promote on who will be best for the job.

The Paper that Supported the Blackshirts, the one that loves photographing teenage young women around exam results time, presumably would like people in an office so older men can leer/letch or worse towards young women.

it was Charlie Mullins that mentioned the golf course but if it resonates.....

Charlie Mullins is a twat, so not really.

I have never played golf in my life and not likely to start because I have hayfever.

A lot of my older colleagues reevaluated their lives during lockdown, calculated that they could afford to retire early, and did so. They are probably the ones on the golf course.

I've been in support calls with Microsoft engineers at 10pm because they work at Redmond time. I'm able to do that because I'm already set up to work from home with access to our servers etc and I don't have to commute afterwards at a time when the buses and trains are stopping for the night. When the call is over, I can jump in the shower and be in bed before midnight in order to be well-rested before getting up at 8:30am for my 9am meeting where I can report to my boss what happened in the support call. Yes, I take TOIL for those late stints, as is my right, but that TOIL doesn't look like me needing to sleep in the following morning because I didn't get home until gone 1am.

My job is nominally 9-5 and this late working is on a goodwill basis despite it being necessary to get support from US-based vendors. WFH is a major reason why my employer gets that goodwill late working from me. If they stopped that, I'd stop the late support calls with vendors.

I ask whether you would work at 10pm in a supposedly 9-5 job? If not, then kindly stop calling WFH staff "lazy".

So you just believe what others tell you without checking it for yourself? Great critical thinking skills there.

Serious recommendation: check claims for yourself before commenting on them.

I think the DM genuinely just hates people. Pretty much all people from what I can gather, except for the extremely wealthy.

This is very true too I think

This is it. A lot of businesses which have been run on patriarchal lines find WFH irritating because it allows working women to circumvent all the presenteeism and bullshit and actually structure their lives in a way which suits them.

I spend years working in the City having to pay a childminder to pick my kid up after school when I was able to work perfectly well from home because my bosses, egged on by male staff, thought that the bankers and brokers we work with would be offended at the idea of people working flexibly. Because we all have to ape this ridiculous culture of arses on seats just for the sake of it. Mainly because, let's be honest, "facilitated" men (men with stay at home wives running around after them), think that the natural order of things is the bloke going into the City to bring home the bacon with the man running around after the kids. They think that's the natural order of things.

Post COVID that whole fiction has broken down and not a moment too soon. We all now can see that actually most people work perfectly effectively from home: in many cases more effectively without the distractions of being in an office.

The Telegraph is even worse than the Mail on this front: constantly banging on about the supposed snowflakery of people WFH. That ship has sailed though. The people who believe in this sort of shit are too old to matter for much longer. People of Millennial age and younger would find it bizarre that you coerce people to sit at a computer at a desk in EC1 when you can do it perfectly adequately in another postcode while also making sure your children are taken care of.

This. Hard copies of the paper are much more profitable than internet clicks, and commuters buy papers. Homeworking is killing the daily newspaper industry.

Well the DM likes WFH today as the government have announced the growth of WFH means more people on disabilty benefits can now be expected to work.

My DH has been able to WFh since covid. He loves golf. He’s a consultant which means that his workload varies wildly. His company are flexible with him to play golf when workload is low, and in exchange he happily pulls very very long days when a project is due.

Before WFH he would just have been sat in the office with nothing to do during one of the down times. Which is such a waste of time.