And people will accept it, because they'll be fired if they refuse and someone more desperate will deal with it so long as they get paid at some point.
Pretty much everyone wants to go this direction. The problem is that there are still serious hurdles in place -- mainly due to the nature of the work, or cultural/interpersonal challenges.
The only solution seems to be:
1. Universal Basic Income - ie. giving people the freedom to say no to sh*tty jobs rather than being forced to take the least bad offer
2. Make a law that gives employees the right to work remotely if their job can reasonably be done remotely
Great for the people in those places, but your happiness to be able to skip the commute may quickly turn into a lot of unhappiness because you can't make a living wage anymore.
My personal ideal is a dedicated office space in a location very close to my home, like in the nearest downtown, where I would pay a certain amount per month in return for a set of days on which I could reserve personal office space.
The issue with working from home for me is that I feel my personal life and work life become messy and entangled if I do too much work at home. Similar to how good sleep hygiene involves doing as few activities other than sleeping on your bed as possible, I feel for my mental wellbeing it's better to physically separate my work life and home life as much as possible.
Granted I don't hate commuting. Since I take the bus I get a significant amount of reading done.
It's great to change one's work environment every now and then. When I used to work in offices, many days I'd be sick of my office and want to work somewhere else, if only to change things up.
It's the places that can't go remote that is the problem, and those are exactly the places where they need to be open many hours, in order for customers to be able to come.
It feels almost like this would be the most socially responsible thing to do: reduce the effective R0 and allow things to start getting back to normality.
I'm the farthest thing from a "reopen" protester. But I can't help thinking that as a young and healthy individual, this is a valid option that nobody is talking about.
And we still don't know if catching one strain once confers immunity, or for how long. So you won't be "done with it".
If you do get sick you become a burden on an overloaded healthcare system.
The people talking about this option are rightly being shut down.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2... [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-som...
- COVID puts even some of the young and healthy into the ICU
- there are reports of serious long term damage even in mild/asymptomatic cases, so you might be immune until the next big pandemic but your lungs may be busted forever
1. Execution - it's not enough to tell the young and healthy "go get coughed on". Intentionally infecting a significant percentage of the population would almost certainly lead to an outbreak in the remaining population unless extreme care was taken. Keep in mind that a bunch of these young people won't have any symptoms at all- and we probably don't have the resources to test all these young people. The outcome would be too predictable- some young people would want to leave home after a week thinking they never got sick, and then would spread the disease to their community.
2. Politics and fairness - who are the ones most incentivized to be intentionally infected? Who are the ones most capable of declining this program and continuing to isolate at home for the next N months as needed?
Any politician who suggests this plan will be accused of sacrificing the poor and the blue collar, as they are the ones who can't just work remotely for the next year.
Personally, as a WFH-capable employee I would sit this out. Why should I go through this when I'm capable of effectively disappearing from society until the pandemic is over? I'm sure many other office workers agree.
Putting these two points together, this is neither something that we should encourage individuals to do of their own right (lest they fuck it up and hurt their community), nor something any politician would (probably) ever try to coordinate and execute at scale.
Consider volunteering for a "challenge vaccine trial": https://1daysooner.org/
We still don't know enough about this thing, though we are learning more by the day.
As the magic 8 ball says: ask again tomorrow.
And those are just the public health benefits. Saving millions of jobs and livelihoods is no small benefit either.
The end result of all this is you would get sick and then be at risk of getting sick again next year and the year after that all the while putting at risk anyone who is vulnerable.
There is really only one way out of this mess - a vaccine.
(I'm no fan of oversimplification, but this is what's at stake.)
Sars-2 is you get it, and then you get some amount of permanent damage to your lungs and cardiovascular system.
Loop: 1) Work monday-friday 6 hours practise strict social distancing. Work remote if you can. 2) Weekend rest from social distancing see friends.
Its like a binary four square wave with on / off.
Reason: If we practice good social distancing the spread time of the Covid is five days.
Employees will love it, that's for sure, but I don't think employers will get even. You are basically giving your employees a 25% raise on their hourly wage.
There are success stories of companies that pay their employees above market value, either by paying them the same amount for less work, paying them more, or giving them particularly good perks. It is the idea of quality over quantity: by giving out preferential treatment, you get the best employees, and keep them motivated, and their increased productivity will make up for the higher cost. But there are success stories going the other way too: cheap, borderline slave labor and a high turnover. Sometime a high volume of low quality work is effective.
But in most cases, the usual market value is what works best, that's why it is the market value.
I am not saying that working less is bad, but it is a bit unfair to have the employer shoulder all the costs. Maybe make it half/half: 10% less pay for 20% less work.
Value in the economy is created by work and there is simply no substitute for that. Shortening the work week would simply make less value in the economy, making us all poorer and more idle.
Too much idleness I can tell you leads to stress, even more stress than too much work. 40 hours is not too much work.
To solve the problem in the article one could still cut the workforce by half that was present in the office simply by adding more work-from-home time for the workers which I find to be healthy my own experience anyway. our office is made similar overtures, saying when we go back to work lots of us. Be working from home as a way to tackle a space issue.
[1] https://satisologie.substack.com/p/the-makeup-of-a-dollar
In some kinds of jobs this may be true, but in others-- especially ones with substantial intellectual or creative components-- it isn't.
In some cases studies have showed increased output from reduced working hours.
