Working from home is a very old idea, becoming new again during this Age of the Internet.
COVID made telework something of a mania. But there’s been some withdrawal of support for the arrangement from major corporations, and one of the main results of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort in government was to bring government workers back into the office.
Well, sort of. A few months later, some of the measures implemented by DOGE were halted or scaled back.
How goes the trend elsewhere? As soon as something becomes possible, someone in politics wants to make it mandatory. A Reason article by Reem Ibrahim takes a look Down Under: “Do You Have a Right To Work From Home? This Australian Politician Thinks So.”
This politician being Victoria’s Premier Jacinta Allan, who aims to lead Australia into a new era of labor paradise, giving “all employees, regardless of the size of the business, the right to work from home. The legislation — which will be introduced in July as a provision of the Equal Opportunity Act and go into effect in September — does not include exemptions for small businesses.
“Working from home,” Ibrahim writes, “is often a win-win for businesses and employees,” but he fails to say it often isn’t. How do you dig ditches or construct skyscrapers or fish in the deep sea from home? To handle the necessary exemptions and complexity, of course, plenty of red tape would be required, which Mr. Ibrahim does mention.
So, does Jacinta Allan advance this innovation because she is a leader of extraordinary foresight?
Doubtful. A few months ago she had to deal with a mini-scandal: Yorick Piper, her husband, was convicted of drunk driving and had his driver’s license taken away.
Gotta get hubby back to work!
Well, it was a temporary license revocation. But alas, poor Yorick: see what you’ve spawned?!?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Alas, Poor Yorick”
The oscillations of the political left about working from home are quite interesting. I remember a time in which the left insisted that such arrangements were intrinsically exploitative. The real reason that they opposed them was that the concentration of work into offices and, especially, into factories facilitated the organization of workers into unions. But I suppose that, now, inexpensive telecommunications can be made to take the place of conversations in break rooms.
Ms. Ibrahim was attempting to make the point that an arrangement that truly is win-win both for employees and for employers needs no positive action on the part of the state; it merely needs the state to get and stay out of the way, as neither employees nor employers need be forced to win.
Just as you insist, such arrangements often will not be win-win. When they are not beneficial to employers, they will amount to an increase in costs to employers, which in turn will result in reduced demand for labor — some workers will face a net loss in income; some will simply not be employed. In cases in which these arrangements are onerous to workers, they will result in reduced supply of labor. In either case, economic efficiency will suffer and thus life will generally be more costly for the general populace.
Set up your own business that you can run from your home. The people who deliver your food, supply your electricity and keep communication systems running don’t have that luxury.