“How are we going to keep the boys on the farm, after they’ve seen Paris?”
That was the plaintive question after WWI when a great many of the doughboys came home having done just that. Actually, the really big shift came not after WWI, but after WWII as the U.S. had changed from an agricultural society to an industrial one, and the G.I. Bill almost guaranteed that the boys wouldn’t go back to the farm, but on to college (back when that was a worthwhile step) and into the great commercial-industrial complex.
And the commercial-industrial complex meant that for most men, the jobs were “white-collar” and therefore required a uniform of a suit and tie, worn each day into an office of some sort.
Now I’ve ranted about the clothing thing ad nauseam, and I’m not going to add yet another one.
But I remember talking to Mr. Free Market (whose company had had a dress code which pleased me greatly) and in those Covid Times of Working From Home, he made the comment:
“After all this is over, there is just no way any of these kids are going to wear a tie to the office ever again.”
He was right, as he usually is, but in fact that was not the really wrenching societal change which ensued. In fact, the truly pivotal moment came about as a paraphrase of the first sentence of this post:
“How are we going to get them back into the office, once they’ve worked from home?”
Simple answer: mostly, we’re not. Here’s an example:
Big tech companies are still trying to rally workers back into physical offices, and many workers are still not having it. Based on a recent report, computer-maker Dell has stumbled even more than most.
Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.
Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.
Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.
Okay, let’s leave aside the utter bastardy of Dell’s coercive diktat — as an aside, why is it that the notionally laissez-faire tech companies often prove themselves to be worse than any of the Gilded Age’s robber barons? — and see what the employees’ response was:
Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell’s plan to restore its in-office culture.
The publication spoke with a dozen Dell employees to hear their stories as to why they chose to stay remote, and a variety of reasons came up. Some said they enjoyed more free time and less strain on their finances after going remote, and nothing could convince them to give that up now. Others said their local offices had closed since the pandemic or that they weren’t interested in promotions.
“Take your promotion and stick it up your ass” — not quite the expected response, eh?
Looks as though that toothpaste has left the tube. So companies are going to be saddled with these giant, expensive glass-and-steel vanity edifices, full of empty space and echoing corridors.
And I for one, having worked in such environs for many decades, have very little sympathy.
To have a job at such a place, you have to live in or near a city. Whenever I’m in a city, my main though is just how desperately it needs a large meteor impact. Frankly there isn’t enough enough money to get me to live in a city. That’s why I live in a town of 1500 over an hour away from the nearest Wal-Mart. I have a bachelors degree in computer science and a masters degree in business administration, but work at a hardware store, because I’m not willing to play the corporate games of living in a huge city, commuting for three hours per day, and changing jobs every 18 months because hiring budgets are higher than retention budgets. Fuck all of them.
I wish I could work from home. I could , as I am in a job where I could, however I have an asshole boss who plays rampant favorites.
That being said , I like Kim have little sympathy for the traditional buildings that are used for work. Corporations and companies use them like a rat race headquarters to abuse employees.
I do think though that employees of any type of job that either requires in person work (auto mechanic , firefighter) or demands it (such as my asshole boss) should pay the person who works onsite more money than remote employees. Why? Cuz gas, car Insurance, drivers on roads being dangerous etc.
This country is not what it was 20 years ago and it definitely is not what it was even 4 years ago.
My issue is loyalty. I have been in my job now for 6 years. Worked through the scam demic with this job and also still do today. Many others left for bigger and better jobs during the Wuhan flu and now currently in 2024 new people come in and make more money and get better schedules (work from home and vaca whatever time of year they want) and treatment that is better than the loyal employees. And the dump I work for is not the only one pulling this shit.
So while the companies are talking about some who refuse to come back to the office , that is a small portion of the larger problem.
Most loyal employees are being fucked. Lower pay than new employees. Forced to work onsite while new employees work from home.
It’s said because “that’s the labor rate and conditions today not when you were hired”
I look forward to the massive recession and that is inevitable under Bidenomics. I think the powers that be will prop up the economy until we Trump gets back in and then blame the crash on him. Us intelligent people know the truth.
The crash that’s coming will economically wipe out many shitty companies and even individuals who spent tons of money and lived well while mocking others. Many of the work from home people will lose their shirts , cars, homes etc.
Interesting times indeed.
CoffeeMan – when I was growing up in the 70’s, the prevailing wisdom of the blue collar world was to get a job with a big manufacturing company. In my area it was petroleum and chemicals, so Exxon, DuPont, Union Carbide, etc. Once you got hired on, you had a job for life. A GOOD job, with decent pay and benefits. Solid middle class living. I remember one time Carbide put out that they had ten openings for a field maintenance technician, over 1,000 people applied. Everyone wanted that type of job.
I got out of college and my first job with a big company in 1990, still acting like it was 1970. I was loyal, took on any shit job they assigned, and suffered thru to prove myself to the company only to see everything you listed above. Low level white collar was treated worse than any blue collar position and absolutely zero loyalty from the company. I saw new engineers hired on fresh from college making more than I made after 4 years on the job, with two or three pay raises under my belt. I spent 15 years with that company trying to force my way up the ladder, only to continually get fucked by managers to further their own career. Once I decided to leave, the whole loyalty issue clarified itself in my mind. There is none, there will never be none, and you should take every mercenary opportunity to extract as much wealth as you can from the company.
I’m in a much better place now, but yeah. It was bad in the 90’s and has gotten worse every decade since. I’m only a few years from retirement, and damn I can’t hardly wait.
you’re absolutely right. companies see loyalty as a one way street and extract as much labor and work out of you as possible. I wasn’t in construction management very long when I realized that an advertisement for my open position would be in the newspaper far faster than my obituary.
The problem I see with management in several industries is that very often the middle to upper management is filled with very short sighted people who don’t plan or give sufficient thought to their instructions or direction they take a company. They are also thin skinned and cannot take any criticism whatsoever. They routinely ignore the more experienced front line worker and then get pissed when their plans fail. I’ve see this in construction, healthcare and now retail.
Don – thank you for your reply. You are so right on this. I am 40 years old. An “old millennial”. If I was born 2 years earlier I would be a gen x.
I’ve worked since I was 15. I went to a voc school. Took computer and network technology. At 20 I earned a 2 year degrees. Went on to get a 4 year degree and an mba. I’ve worked in Information Technology for over 20 years
Most managers are assholes only looking out for themselves or meeting a short term goal. They shit on the employees.
The general workforce in the USA Today is lazy and stupid. They get paid more to do easy Jobs that the jobs you and I do.
I started in manufacturing at 20 doing IT work for the place. They outsourced part of their it.
I went to a small business. 2008 recession came.
I then worked for another manufacturer. They are one that is famous and moving many of their operations out of Massachusetts. Cuz the politics here suck.
Went to another manufacturer. They were going big corporate with mergers. They were ok but I found a job in a very liberal sector
The bullshit jobs here pay more than I make. I have to bust my ass and work onsite 5 days a week. These liberals I work with are lazy and rock fucking stupid.
They expect you to kiss their ass and give them the world.
I agree with you. White collar sucks. If I could go back in time I’d never go into Information technology. Career sucks. Doesn’t pay well. Fucking bullshit.
Tell all the kids today to go blue collar. When the country hits a recession there won’t be money for bullshit jobs that liberals think are so important.
Unless the jobs are in government. Those bullshit jobs always last. As long as you are in the club. I am NOT in the club
Just from a quality of life (not money) perspective, I probably would have been happier with a mid-level blue collar job. But that’s a personal thing and doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone. But hey, everyone send your kids to college because, uh, something.
The reason corporations have on site physical employees at all is due to ignorance on the employees part. I did the shirt and tie routine until I was 31 then one day I quit and started working for myself.
My reasoning was simple. Why should I restrict myself to one employer when there are thousands of clients out there champing at the bit for what I have to offer?
So, in 1986 I became self employed and have been ever since. My former employer became one of my clients, and so did 3 other former employers.
Working for 1 employer is like putting ALL your financial eggs in 1 basket and then asking a nitwit to carry it. No way. If you have 100 different “employers” (clients) any number of them can “fire” you and it will not catastrophically effect your bottom line.
Since 1986 my work life has been a constant stream of employers (clients) and a handful have lasted more than 30 years. My longest “employer” was acquired in 1988. You only get to fly around the sun so many times and it’s up to each of us to figure out the best way to do that.
An aside: I hadn’t worn a tie in forever, and had a memorial to attend. Guess what I had forgotten how to do? I had to go to fucking youtube University to refresh my memory. Can’t. Even. Dress. Myself.
Ye gods.
I sure am glad that I kept going to school as a young man, because it opened up many doors through which I still travel everyday.
I’m a grad of a public high school and 3 state universities. I kept going further academically because I thought that my doing so would give me the chance to have a pretty good career and life. I just wanted that chance.
So it utterly baffles me to see generations who so lack ambition that they would happily forego the prospect of advancement to minimize the personal hassle factor associated with doing so.
I fully appreciate the negativity and, in many cases, the human misery which are constituent parts of the corporate grind. At earlier points in my career when I was working in large law firms, I felt like a functionary in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
And I had many, many AH bosses whose names I’ll never forget.
I live in both sides of my state ( the good side and the other side), and I have a brick and mortar office in each location where I spend my days slaving away.
At 67, I still work more weekends than not.
But my various academic and work-related steps along the path have led me to the point that I’m my own boss and I mostly work for nice clients.
College used to mean something. Doesn’t mean shit today. I have an mba. I see people dumber than me and lazy get promoted cuz they are in the club. Or they suck dick to get to the top
It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.
I’m glad you got ahead working hard. Many of us work just as hard and get fucked by the system. There’s way more lazy stupid butt sucking ass kissing son of a bitches in the working world and they always seek to have the upper hand.
What you know? Your degree mwa hahahaha. Ok.
I would have preferred to work from home if at all possible, although I only had a 10 minute commute before retiring.
Think of the time and money saved with no vehicle upkeep and no sitting in traffic or rail/subway/bus.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in this topic. (A notable element is the collapse of commercial real estate and city tax bases, but that’s not what I want to talk about today.)
As someone who has spent more than 2/3 of my 30+ year career working from a home office, whose current employer’s workforce base has always been more than 1/2 remote, our current topic of concern really isn’t about whether the company can operate remotely, it always has to some degree or another. When Wuhan virus, er, SARS-COV-2, er….COVID came along, converting to full remote was a mild extension of our existing practices.
To set the stage: Corporations are places where groups of people take coordinated action to realize profit. Getting more than 2 or 3 people to act coherently isn’t natural or instinctive. It is a learned behavior that is not taught in family life or school life. It is very much an act of literal socialization, imparting the ways and means of working together so as to produce value. These ways and means are deeply tied to that production of value.
Accordingly, what IS of deep concern for us is the younger set. Everyone here who works remotely did so as a seasoned and experienced adult who already brought to the table their previous, varied, but effective experiences of productively working in a corporate environment. The kids coming out of their remote college experience, who grew up with social media and Zoom believe themselves to be fully equipped…and they absolutely are clueless as to coordinated adult productive action. My advice to my own daughter who thought she’d start right out following in her dad’s footsteps lounging in her home gaming den was to illustrate all the ways in which she wasn’t prepared for that, and that the most practical path for her was to plan to work onsite for at least the first 3-5 years of her career.
Of course, how that exactly is to happen is something of a mystery, with on site opportunities dwindling. Alas, we will have to Gunny Highway the thing: improvide, adapt & overcome.
Very good point. I worked remotely for ~6 months during the pandemic. I was effective and productive, but then again I already had 30+ years of experience in the field so I knew what needed to be done. Kids out of school certainly won’t be able to match that without some time in the office and/or the field.
On the other hand, it also may come back to bite those opt outs in the ass. How long will it take for employers to realize that if a job can be done at a kitchen table in suburban America, it can also probably be done in Bombay or Moldova, but for much less?
THAT particular bullet has already gone through the church — hell, it happened back in the 1990s.
How far are we from a time when all (90%) of all blue-collar jobs will be accomplished by “robots” operated remotely from home?
brain-storming sessions over a “Zoom” call (with a rare, occasional get-together for a pint)?
and typists and file clerks a thing of the far past?
Part of the problem with the “or else” is that the else was already in effect. Virtually no corporations promote from within anymore, and their employees knew there wasn’t going to be any promotion to grab anyway. You climb the ladder by lateral moves between companies, not by climbing vertically within a company.
It’s a problem of the corporations’ own making.
I’ve certainly seen this enough to verify it to be true.
Some employers, and Dell is a prime example, won’t be promoting White American Men anyway, so why bother going into the office? Pradeep or Sanjit will get the promotions.
I was in a similar situation working for a major Houston hospital system. There were 4 layers of DEI between me and the next white man up my chain of command.
In earlier jobs I was hybrid and got to make my own schedule. Went to the office when I had in-person meetings, went to visit clients and other sites when needed, worked at home when it didn’t matter. Now I’m told what days I’m in the office and no flexibility. Many days I fight my way through traffic just to have Teams meetings with people hundreds of miles away.
Many of those Dell workers still expect promotions, just not at Dell.
Been on all sides of this issue:
Work from home simply in 90% of the cases is not as efficient as in office, its too easy for people to hide/pretend in plain sight. That said there are offsetting benefits as well. I don’t have some colleague coming up to me, wasting 2 hours droning on about the football game over the weekend. I also don’t have ANYONE to talk to, which in my world is a huge PLUS.
Commercial real estate and the associated tax base is going to take a huge dump. Local .gov’s should plan ahead and start trimming their own budgets in anticipation. However they will just figure out a way to dump their tax bastardy onto someone else, on the belief of, better 10000 dead citizens than one .gov supervisor lose their job. Its only a matter of time before some dickhead proposes turning commercial real estate into homeless shelters or something. The genuinely sad consequence though is the impact to tertiary businesses that serviced these locations, like restaurants, barbershops, gyms etc.
As for corporate Amerika….straight up fuck-em. They only play the loyalty card, when it benefits them, there is no top down loyalty. Just like the .gov tries to play the Patriotism card when they’re about to drill you in the ass. It’s your duty after all. Doing a job and getting paid for it is one thing, having to sit through hours of Woke Inc. bullshit is quite another.
Read an article about how Employee Engagement is also at an all time low (defined as doing the bare minimum to meet expectations), whereas engaged employees stay late, work hard, do discretionary work etc. Needless to say no one had the answer, not because there isn’t one, but because the answer runs afoul of the zeitgeist. Reward good employees, stop ramming Woke bullshit down everyone’s throats (a 50yr old high achiever probably doesn’t give a shit about your Pride month activities), are a good start.
But here’s an overlooked area and I just transitioned too it in my company. I do high level IT work and keeping the IT lights on was MY responsibility. I had ownership over the planning, implementation, and performance of my areas. Then at the compulsion of New Owners we were forced, over my stringent objections to move everything to the Cloud…..because Cloud you know. Needless to say everything has gone to hell performance and cost wise. Now that I’ve gone from an owner to a renter (sharecropper), fuck it. I do exactly what I am expected to do, discretionary work–hell with that, and candidly don’t give a shit because it isn’t mine anymore. Meanwhile our leadership is standing around with its mouth open wondering why stuff isn’t working as well as it used to. You were warned. /rant.
Most good people don’t do good work for just the money or recognition. They do it out of the sense that they moved Western Civilization forward at least a fraction of an inch, with what they did that day. Be it digging coal, building trucks, writing code, whatever. When you remove the sense that they make a meaningful contribution….they just quiet quit, until they can find a better offer.
I was never so happy when it became permissible to make sales calls in a company polo shirt and khakis instead of a suit and tie. The suits only get broken out for weddings and funerals these days.
I will admit I was more productive working out of an office that at home. I could always find something to distract me at home.
There is a question of career or job. John Boyd seems to get credited with tell his accolades, ” You can be somebody or do something. Make the choice.” My purpose at work was to get paid enough to do the things I wanted to do outside of work. This is not true for many people. After we were acquired by a Fortune 500 company all our titles were changed. The HR person said I was now a manager and not a director. I asked did the pay change and when she said no I was fine. Two of my colleagues went absolute batshit when they were told. They were career driven to be somebody and left for other opportunities
I will admit I would never make a good corporate employee or for that matter a military officer. I don’t manage up very well . My customers and co workers always gave me high marks for getting along with people and program management. My two brief periods working for large companies were totally unsatisfactory and frustrating. At one I got a President’s Award and then let go with in the same year.
Retirement is good!
As a dentist, after racking up school debt, I had to rack up debt to establish an office.
One of my friends purchased a high ranch in a pleasant middle-income suburb with great schools and converted the first floor into a fully-equipped 2-operatory office.
Whereas I had to fight traffic an hour and a half each way, whenever he had a cancellation, he could play with his kids; whereas I had to pay ever-increasing high rent, taxes, and utilities in the city, his increased as well, but at less than half the rate.
Work from home! Oh, yeah, but unfortunately it’ll have to be in my next life.