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.

What does that have to do with Wfh?

Alll those MPs and capitalists making all those doctors, nurses and police officers go into work each day… bloody awful!

IMO the return to the office is most often pushed by middle and higher management who are failing to adjust to the post Covid age.
Tech is available to measure every aspect of a persons activity and productivity, and in business if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. If a person is WFH it is actually easier to measure this than for office based people.
Some managers are slow to take this tech up because they want people to return as they see WFH as a ‘management perk’, and continued WFH as an erosion of executive power.
For context, I have worked remotely since the turn of the century.

This is just so outdated now.

A Friday night pub crawl isn’t helpful or essential to any role. Some people like it and want to do it but many don’t and a lot of young people aren’t doing that anyway.

As for being unable to mentor effectively over Teams- this isn’t true. You can.

I admit that WFH vs office working is very individual as in some will benefit more from one or the other. But the way this post and every anti work from home article is written is as if it’s black and white and everyone benefits equally from working in the office.

I don’t. I found it great to work from home and I’m a lot more productive at home as I don’t have to listen to forced office chit chat and I can just get on. I’m more likely to stay on late to get things done at home than in office because I’m not thinking about the commute.

im also more collaborative over Teams as I’m quite quiet and shy and I can get my point across there without louder personalities taking over.

This isn’t true for all and some prefer office environments. However the push to ban WFH isn’t remotely based on what is best for the company or the employees. It’s based on what is best for the people who own the properties they’ve rented out.

Nowadays any employer that can offer work from home even in a hybrid basis would be foolish to not do so.

I know, WFH has absolutely changed the working world for disabled people. Disabled people in digital roles can now work comfortably from home, they can apply for more opportunities as they don't have to factor in how to get to the office and how to work in the office, it has changed so many lives for the better. I almost find the I hate WFH stance quite ableist.

What gets me is that these guys seem to be immune to the impact of being such massive hypocrites. I suspect it is that people just like having their biases and bigotry confirmed and reinforced regardless of who is doing it. It's the only way I can explain why Trump is so popular with people who would normally hate someone like him.

This is exactly why wfh people take the piss, can you not see the irony in your comment?

Ageism is rife on MN. Time it was stamped out. No other demographic gets the blame for absolutely everything the way the older people do.

It might interest you to know I couldn't buy a house in the early 70s because 3 times my husband's wage (they wouldn't count mine although I was working) wasn't enough. Eventually we bought a rundown 2 up 2 down, did it up and sold it at a loss as the market crashed. Hope that helps with your bitterness.

How do the independent and Guardian do that? Interesting two publications to single out on a thread about the right wing hateful rag that is the Daily Mail?

daily mail just does everything to do with creating tensions and fuelling hate better so I’m sure other publications pale in comparison to it in this respect.

DM aren’t even subtle about it - no one can miss what they’re doing.

Your council tax bill would be even higher if those empty buildings were full. It costs money to heat and light it and that money can be saved when the building is empty.

People really need to learn about the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Yep, us oldies never had it so good, just so we could make it so much harder for our kids….selfish gits aren’t we!

This is sadly true.

I agree with you about how they ‘revel’ in it and I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone who works there would think this is the way to go, most hateful newspaper I’ve ever come across personally

Absolutely nothing but a certain group of posters will grab any opportunity to display their prejudice, even if it isn't a very good opportunity.

Hmmmmmm….

I hate the DM, but lots of London-based publishing/journalist types (ourselves included) are back 4 days a week with 1 day WFH. Ultimately it’s likely in most people’s interest to prevent a further corrosion of central London residential and commercial property prices, this could create a larger housing crash over most of the UK. With interest rates so high, this may mean the perfect negative equity storm for the many not the few. We already have a cost of living crisis, the economy needs boosting, you could argue each of us has a duty to bolster this if we are able. Personally I find WFH dull, but I always enjoyed the central London shops, restaurants, culture, bars. 🤷‍♀️

Being able to attend a relative's medical emergency in 20 min instead of an hour and 20m because of not having to commute home first is not taking the piss. Most employers offer emergency leave for family illness and that policy would kick in whether you WFH or not.

Being able to spend what was your commute time caring for someone is not taking the piss either.

Question for you
Everytime I phone Housing benefit I am told there is a backlog.
It had been 3 years now.
For RBKC work from home is not working.
Why is there a backlog that only begin since covid and wfh?

Agree. Also councils can’t just randomly sell off buildings, it takes ages to do anything like that due to the need for them to be financially transparent.

Council tax probably went up 10% because everything councils are paying for went up 10% last year —thanks for Liz Truss— due to inflation.

It’s all about keeping the investment groups who own Pret A Manger & the office blocks going.

So we’ve got to go into the office but not use cars and you’ve got to buy lunch out every day then cook from scratch when you get home after your two hour commute on two buses & picked your kids up from childcare.

Sounds fun.

They don’t realise life exists outside of London and we don’t have good public transport. HS2 annoys me too. Why would anyone want to commute from Manchester to London everyday?

Life’s moving on & people need to accept it.

Maybe applications have gone up since Covid?

They've had two kind of sold for two years options by developers agreed on them. So they're off the market. I'm sorry but who would agree to an open ended arrangement like that. The developers haven't paid anything yet, the council still responsible for deteriorating buildings . Just put them up for auction, sale and get rid.

I’m with you. WFH has worked wonders for my mental health. I’m a happier, more productive, more mentally balanced person.

Being in the office full time was hell. I go once a week now and that’s been great to touch base and fulfil the ‘social’ element.

We couldn't afford to buy a house (2 bed) on two professional salaries in the 2000's and a more generous loan to salary ratio of 4.5x. And it has only got worse since then, plenty of people in negative equity now or having homes repossessed even though interest rates are still much lower than they were in the late 80's. And I wasn't wasting my money on avocado toast and lattes.

Perhaps this may explain why the generations after you feel they have a worse deal than your generation and are not really in the mood to listen to you constantly going on about how much tougher you had it.

As a millennial I find it utterly laughable that you think the boomer generation gets "all the blame" for our current situation. Bashing millennials has been a full-time occupation for many older people over at least the last decade as far as I can see and now there is the backlash and you don't like it. Well tough, suck it up.

It's amazing how easily these newspapers manipulate their readers isn't it. My FIL is a PhD educated, analytical, critical thinking person, but believes everything he reads in the Telegraph. So yes, he's mentioned WFH despite my DH having WFH full time for 7 years, along with how young people today (he means us, mid thirties with kids) are eating too much UPF and are too lazy to make a meal from scratch. This is the man who finds beans on toast challenging to make, and actually eats more UPF than he realises as he loves sausages etc! And my dad is enraged that young people today "don't prioritise saving for a house deposit" whilst also being told by their estate agent that the small property they rent out will achieve double their initial rent estimate.
Somehow these clever people don't join the dots that not all these things can be true at the same time.

I don't think you're alone. One of my clients has recently lost very two talented young members of staff who have both accepted jobs in office-based city centre companies versus their previous WFH roles.

I always just wonder how these folk think the government managed to introduce furlough, rapid testing centres etc during lockdown - reader all the civil servants who delivered this worked from home as their offices were closed too...

Also public sector workforce always had more flexibility than a lot of private employers - it was one of the ways that the civil service could recruit when it couldn't compete on salaries (yes pension benefits can be better but a good pension doesn't feed your kids). Now there's much more flexibility in the wider workforce civil service have to continue to be at least as flexible in order to recruit & retain staff