to think some people would be weirdly excited if WFH came to an end?

[LoveWFH]

Why do some posters sound almost delighted at the thought of Nigel Farage stopping WFH?

There’s this tone of “that’ll teach them” whenever it comes up. As if people working from home have been getting away with something.

Here’s the practical bit though. My company couldn’t bring everyone back full time even if it wanted to. They’ve sold off chunks of the office space. Whole buildings gone. Desks gone. Leases not renewed. There literally isn’t room for everyone anymore.

Hybrid working isn’t some trendy phase. It’s how a lot of businesses are set up now. They’ve planned for it. Budgeted for it. Recruited around it.

You can’t magically create space that no longer exists.

If you prefer being in the office, fair enough. Plenty of people do. But I don’t get the satisfaction at the idea of other people losing flexibility that works for them and their employer.

My team are scattered around Europe and the US. It simply isn't possible to force us all into an office. The company hiring policy was to try to recruit the best for the job not the best for the job who happen to live in a 30 mile radius of a particular office building. It's worked brilliantly for them and their staff for nearly 20 years. Covid lockdown had no effect on us at all.

It's easy to write him off as full of shit because he is. He asserts something he can't prove.

If the people on the ground have this information, you'll be able to link us to it. Because they'd need much more than their own necessarily anecdotal experience, especially because lots of them won't actually have this information in the first place. How exactly would courts dealing with fines know what percentage of the parenting population are remote workers?

Sorry but this is nonsense. Besides even people who work in the office no longer wear formal work wear.
My son in law works from home every day. He has no choice there is no office. The children know he is working. It has never occurred to them to think they shouldn't go to school because daddy is working at home .

School refusal has nothing to do with parents working from home. When I was at school my mother didn't work and my father was a shift worker so they were often both at home when my siblings and I went to school. We didn't think we should stay home because they did. How is working from home different?

They are probably the same sort of people who took delight in the price increases of mounjaro meaning some people could no longer afford to continue, and those who take delight in people regaining weight after weight loss (however they lose the weight)

There are plenty of jobs that are 'working class', ie, non professional, that are done from home. Call centres, sales, administion, lower grade public sector, lower level banking, HR support etc. Or are you defining anything non manual as 'middle class'?

Ironcially many historic UK town centres consist of buildings which were originally housing which have since been converted to shops and offices.

Of course 200 years ago it was still entirely usual for business to be conducted from the home – even weaving. With the advent of power spindles and looms, spinning and weaving moved into mass factories with power, but shops and one-person businesses continued to be in the home, as did piece-work in many industries.

The earliest large, purpose-built offices I can think of were for large banks and insurance companies in big cities, which certainly existed by 1870, but working from a room in the home continued to be normal for small businesses. Later shops expanded to take over the whole ground floor rather than just the front room. I remember our village grocery shop knocking through its ground floor in the 1970s; and looking at architecture I think "the flat over the shop" design continued to appear in new builds at that time.

So town centres have had many formats over the centuries, and could have again. People could live in them. It does need to be thought about and local planning be done accordingly, but it's just yet another era in the life of a town.

He just tries to create divide wherever he can. His supporters thrive on their hate and false sense of injustice.

His pals the millionaire property owners must be rubbing their hands in glee at this particular outburst.

Its about being at home, the numbers of parents 'at home' have increased under wider acceptance of WFH, they link together.

How can you prove causation rather than correlation?

I wouldn't be weirdly excited about it, no. But while I think it works extremely well for some roles, I know it works extremely badly for others. I think some services have absolutely gone to the dogs since WFH became the acceptable norm.

Some companies have tried to backtrack on this, realising it's not optimum for productivity, teamwork, customer relations, but they are met with such resistence from staff that they are reluctant to let go that they feel held to ransom and like they have no choice but to continue with WFH or hybrid working.

To me, if you took on your role on the clear understanding (written in your contract) that your presence in the office or at in person meetings/site visits was minimal, then you can argue that nothing should change. But if you've moved over to WFH or hybrid working by stealth, especially if it started with COVID, and there is nothing in your contract about it, then if your employer wants you back in the office, you go back in the office. If you've chosen to move three hours away, that's your problem to solve. If you can't solve it they should sack you.

I agree that he did this because Reform exists to represent oligarchs interests in parliament, and enforcing office working forces businesses to lease space and benefits the property owners and investors.

The other thing though is that Farage’s supporters are by and large geriatric, and didn’t have the technology to WFH in these kinds of role in the past. And many boomers seem to love it when younger people don’t get to enjoy improvements in life. Somehow the world can only ever be like it was for them, and may never ever change.

I’ve seen this too - went to a lunchtime school performance, loads of parents there. After watching for a bit the mum next to me expressed surprised that the performance was going to be much much longer. So she pulled out her phone to give it a few swipes to make it look like she was working and buy her a few more minutes. 😂

I did feel great empathy. I wfh exclusively before maternity leave and I found it much less stressful and more productive.

My elderly Dad worked for employers for a few years of his entire working life and hated it then was a self-employed taxi driver for years then didn't pay income tax as a foster carer for 20 years, with a now-dead wife (not my Mum) claiming PIP for a decade before she died before retiring at 65 with a 4 bed house fully paid off and a very substantial amount in savings and is entitled to full pension and complains about people on benefits.

He knows I WFH and makes little digs all the time 'don't work too hard tee hee' oh you've got 5 meetings today? actual meetings or online? oh online? that's okay then, sure you'll manage'.

He does think I at least do some sort of a job but is convinced most people WFH are doing nothing or living abroad and 'phoning it in.

He's got the easiest life you could imagine and has benefitted from years of 'benefits' paid for by the government which he of course thinks he was 100% entitled to but that no-one else is or should be.

I wonder, actually. Obviously this was partly about arse licking to corporate property interests, so he did as he was bidden there, but I think he overshot with the stuff about work life balance. That will have gone down well with the sort of harrumphing retired twat Reform already do really well with, but not so much with the parts of the working age population they want to target. Because even the sort of in person employee who resents wfh is often still pretty keen on the idea of work life balance.

I've always worked in retail, so that's not something I could do from home (and working during the pandemic utterly sucked.) But I could see my lovely colleagues and I don't think I'd have survived without that human contact.

Meanwhile my friend's DH works from home and only goes to the office once a week (and has an awful lot of fun by the sounds of it!) Some days he's really busy, some days he's not, but I don't begrudge people who can work from home.

My company couldn’t bring everyone back full time even if it wanted to. They’ve sold off chunks of the office space. Whole buildings gone. Desks gone. Leases not renewed. There literally isn’t room for everyone anymore.

Similar with us, moved offices three or four years ago, the (one) women's loo can barely cope when there are about five women in the office, if everyone was in all the time it would break down every day. The heating and air conditioning is rubbish, the sunlight through the glass roof is blinding, the water cooler doesn't work - I don't complain about these things because I can put up with them one day a week but if we all had to go in five days a week I think they would have to sort some of those things out, definitely the toilet situation.

I'm generalising tbf. Broadly speaking, Reform is trying to appeal to 'man in van' and low-income people (who believe they'd have more money if immigrants were kicked out), and retired people (who have rose-tinted glasses about how Britain was better ie whiter when they were young). The majority of these people are not home workers.

People don't like change, even when that change doesn't directly affect them.

lets face it most people shop on line, we know that as online sales have grown for the last 20 years, but people are not happy with empty shops in the high street. They'll use out of town shopping parks but still moan and complain about the empty shops on the high street - things change and high streets are changing due to the other two factors - but people do 't like that change

The difficulty with this is that so many organisations are also working with smaller staffs than they were 6 years ago. People think it's due to remote working because that's the most obvious factor that's changed. Companies can't keep that quiet. Whereas they can refrain from telling you that they're experiencing delays because their team used to have 20 workers and now has 16 for the same volume of work.

You also touch on something else that interests me here, which is that people often assume the choice is between a remote worker and an in person worker of equal quality and renumeration. It's not, especially as the number of people providing and needing care has increased. Leaving aside legal arguments about custom and practice after 6 years, an organisation can tell someone who doesn't want to come back to the office that it's either return or fuck off. What this doesn't do is create someone else who'll do it in person, especially for low paid remote roles like customer service that struggle to recruit.

Working class people are very much office workers. Office work and admin are low paid and easy jobs, not needing a lot of skill. Most of my colleagues at my last job at a large company were from the local council estate. The 'working class' people you are probably thinking of that can't work from home, builders, plumbers, carpenters earn way more than office workers or IT professionals and most professionals in most cases. No one cares about class anymore it's irrelevant.

I have been suspecting this for a long while. Why does ANYONE care if the work gets done? I think patriarchy doesn’t love it because dads have to be present more and can’t hoard better jobs and hide behind the provider role as effectively. And business has A LOT of investment in limiting leisure time. People with pressured leisure spend more on that leisure time to increase its perceived quality and more on labour saving services and devices to increase its perceived quantity. Contented people don’t fuel the economy. Especially if they are contented at home.

When you think about it people will be spending less on takeaways, prepped lunches, coffees, personal tech, work clothes, make up, fuel, parking, audiobooks, handbags, haircuts, after work drinks. People who are out buying less, buy less on impulse as well. Maybe even managing with one car, not passing the gym or the florist etc etc. I think people who work from home have better work life balance, are less stressed and happier. And capitalism is fuelled by discontent.

I think this is unfair. Many older people like in person service. Sometimes for valid reasons. They struggle to hear as well on the phone. They prefer to deal with physical documents rather than E versions. They find technology slower than conversation. They tend to equate the loss of in person services with WFH, without realising that in person services have disappeared because remote delivery is cheaper. So things would be remote regardless of whether the person on the phone is sitting in an office or their house. These people are not wanting people in workplaces to be mean, its because they believe if they were there they'd get to see them. Which would by no means be the case.

This.

Most of my career has been in jobs that can't be done WFH. I went into workplaces all through COVID lockdowns. I'm still very in favour of people WFH where they can, I don't understand the hatred,and naked jealousy, from some people who can't WFH.

When everyone was WFH I could get to work in 15 minutes. Once everyone went back to the office it took over an hour in 3 lanes of crawling polluting traffic jams. It's actually even worse now than pre COVID.

I have no words for how fucking stupid it is 🤦

Exactly this

It I not a right wing policy, as Reform is not right wing in the traditional sense. Reform is a divide and conquer party with strongly authoritarian views.

We should all be very worried about them coming into power regardless of our political views, assuming our political views are coherent and generally rational. Reform are neither of those things, they appeal to our fears and emotions, usually our worst ones.

Isn't he funded by JCB hugely? So new developments for office space would likely be in their portfolio. Probably cheaper to build too as less regulations if people don't live there.