Despite the fact that as early as June 2014 Zoom had 10 million users, you would have been hard-pressed before March this year to find anyone who didn’t associate the name with an ice lolly, or a song by Fat Larry’s Band rather than a technology company. Since March that has changed and Zoom seems to have become the application of choice for anyone organising an online meeting or exercise class.
Many people who were not familiar with Zoom would probably
have heard of Skype, however, yet Zoom seems to have completely eclipsed it as
the preferred video conferencing solution for virtually everyone, despite the
fact that Skype was around for a decade before Zoom emerged. A couple of years
ago, Val’s employers tried to set up a system to use Skype for meetings, and I
got roped into trying to help to get it to work at home. It was not a success.
Now, although Val’s employment status has changed, she still attends one work
related meeting per month, and since COVID-19, those meetings have been online
using Zoom; Skype has been abandoned in the meantime.
The effect that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the
workplace has required employers and employees to adopt new and innovative
solutions to keep their businesses running, and working from home is the most obvious.
Working from home (WFH) has been vital during the pandemic, but as lockdown
eases, the case for having people work from home rather than return to their
offices diminishes.
Although there is now less of an argument for people working
from home, that does not mean that it is a given that everyone will go back to
their offices. In the past, there was an argument that working from home enabled
people to skive, that the productivity and performance of home workers was
difficult to monitor. In fact, that argument seems to still hold with some
people. On LBC, radio host Nick Ferrari last week said, "People need to
go back to their places of work. Do you know why we have offices? So you can do
some damned work. What do you think is going to get this country going again?
You sitting in your jim-jams not doing anything all day long?” I would argue that while by the law of
averages there must be some people who do little when they work from home
(apparently the Sitel employees, engaged
by the government for the track-and-trace process are among them, making on
average 0.14 calls per agent, per day according to a report on the Guardian
website [1])
the majority of people are gainfully employed and productive.
 Nick Ferrari |
I’d say that Ferrari’s comments are based on prejudice and
stereotyping and he has absolutely no evidence that people are lounging around
in their pyjamas, doing nothing (apart from the contract tracers, but that is
scarcely their fault). There again, I have a bit of a prejudice myself…against
LBC. The bulk of the content on the station (which I am old enough to remember being
launched back in 1973 as the London Broadcasting Company) seems to be phone-ins, for which I have no great love. My aversion to phone-ins and LBC goes back
to the 1970s when my father listened to interminable call-in programmes on the station in which well-meaning but ill-informed and/or excruciatingly inarticulate
callers would betray their own prejudices in calls inevitably prefaced with a
statement that they were ‘a first-time caller.’
Like Ferrari, Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith would like people to
return to their normal places of work. Last month he called on employers to get
their staff back in the workplace, contradicting the advice of the Scientific
Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), who recommended that WFH measures should
stay in place. Duncan Smith said that SAGE had no right to tell employers what
to do because “most of them have never run a business.” Duncan Smith has never
run a business; his career outside politics consists of six years in the armed
forces. This government’s enthusiasm for ‘following the science’ seems only to
apply when the science supports its own agenda.
Iain Duncan Smith
Given Duncan Smith’s statement this week about the EU
Withdrawal Agreement, which he voted for, having assisted in hurrying it
through Parliament on the basis that it had been sufficiently scrutinised, but
which he now claims costs too much, denies us true independence and contains
stuff that has been buried in clauses no one (including him!) has read, it’s
probably just as well he has never run a business, it’s difficult to imagine he
would have made a success of it.
The remarks by both Ferrari and Duncan Smith reveal the
conflict inherent in releasing the lockdown, and the pace at which it is
released – it’s a question of Health v Wealth, and there’s obviously more to it
than getting workers out of their pyjamas, off their sofas, out of Zoom
meetings and back into their offices. Those working from home pay no fares, buy
no morning coffee, spend no money on lunch from Pret, don’t pop into the pub
with colleagues after work, generally they are not spending or consuming as
much as before. The fact that many people working from home are likely to be
spending a good deal less than normal is a factor in the contraction of the economy,
and regardless of your political hue, that cannot be a good thing.
If you can do your job at home as well as you can in the
office (some can, some can’t), it may seem that it makes little sense to go
back. But, those who would prefer to continue working from home might like to
consider that if they do their job from home, then so could someone else,
in their home, but not necessarily in this country. For the employer, this may
have the benefit of being in a country where labour is cheaper, where there are
no pension contributions, where holidays are fewer and where workers’ rights are
generally weaker.
It’s a logical extension of offshoring and outsourcing that
the jobs that remain in the UK that it has been proven can be done as
effectively from home as in an office, can be equally effectively performed
from a home, regardless of where that home is. Perhaps getting off that sofa and
back into the office might not be a bad idea after all.
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