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It has zero chance of passing the Senate or getting signed into law. All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the

It has zero chance of passing the Senate or getting signed into law. All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker. The federal government encourages remote working, and has for many years. Why? Because the D.C. Beltway is a congested clusterf#!$, and keeping people off the roads who don't absolutely need to be makes the commute better for everyone.

Someone1234 4y ago
Yep. Better for car pollution, better for urban house prices, better for the cost of gas, better for families/kids, and better for rural communities (as people move out of cities, and take their relatively high salaries/disposable income with them). It does cause a short term shift as downtown support businesses (e.g. coffee shops, food, etc) have to move closer to where people live. But that is largely a return to what was normal 50 years ago anyway.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  But what about the team leader/manager's egos though?
  - jcpst 4y ago
    Ah yes. That is the one benefit of the SHOW UP act- it does help the ego of managers.
    - toss1 4y ago
      >> it does help the ego of managers. Fix:: ... the ego of BAD managers I read some studies from a decade before COVID about remote work, and the upshot was that teams under previously under-performing managers indeed performed worse, but the previously higher-performing teams performed better. Makes sense because bad managers manage to the signs of work, not work itself - it the but in the chair, not talking to someone else, etc., whereas the good managers manage to their targets and DGAF about the signs. Send the poor manager's teams remote, and now they not only lack direction on real goals, but now they're also free of being hounded. Send the top managers' teams remote, and they have the same guidance, but less time and effort squandered commuting, less office interruptions, etc, and they improve. Considering the studies and recent experience, I'd almost consider it a test of a manager's skill - if they cannot manage a remote team productively, they cannot manage a local one. (Of course meanwhile, the right wing has gone fully into abusive leader attitude over any facts, and so squanders Congress' time with nonsense like this. Ugh) (Edit: typo)
  - saghm 4y ago
    Good point, discouraging micromanaging and flaunting power is another benefit they didn't list
- luckylion 4y ago
  Worse for rural house prices though, right?
  - sgt101 4y ago
    There's a lot of rural out there..
- bobulous 4y ago
  remote work is great but moving to a rural area or suburb is not better for the environment
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    Wasn't something that was claimed. Reducing driving in better for the environment.
  - atonse 4y ago
    Is that as cut and dry? Me living in a suburb is only "far away" if I have to commute somewhere far away daily. But if I barely drive ever, and work entirely remote, is it so bad to live in a suburb? Genuinely wondering.
    - mjmahone17 4y ago
      It’s not so bad if you are in fact walking most places and spending less time in a car. True it’s better than commuting somewhere far, but if you compare to living without a car in an urban core, it’s unlikely your footprint is smaller. Especially if you now live in a 3,500 square foot detached single story home that consumes a lot of heating energy, whereas in a city you’d have say 1,500 square feet with two shared walls and a shared ceiling/floor (basically you have a larger footprint based on insulation and exposed surface area). The problem is most US towns and suburbs are not set up to be core walkable, dense places, where you don’t even need a car to get home. There are exceptions (I can think of some Hudson Valley towns on train stations, where their core has mixed use multi-story attached housing), but that’s not the norm and is generally discouraged via zoning.
      - atonse 4y ago
        Totally true. And as I think about this more, I'm not thinking enough about other impacts of that sprawl: Sure, I'm not driving as much, but that's because I'm getting a lot of things delivered to me, so SOMEONE is driving around a lot on my behalf (and I'm having to pay for it too). Although with package deliveries, the impact is amortized by all the packages so the impact is probably less than if I had driven to the store, this isn't true of grocery and food deliveries. Those are about as inefficient as would be if I did that driving myself. The approach of thinking about suburbs/city/etc will all have to account for the new hybrid lifestyle of remote work now – where people are living in remote areas but still not driving that much either.
- danaris 4y ago
  Noting that I fully support remote work... Your last point does have a pretty big caveat, in that widespread strict residential zoning outright prohibits almost every kind of useful support business from setting up shop close enough to where many people live (that is, in the suburbs). The answer to this, of course, is "so let's get rid of that hopelessly strict zoning, which is bad for a host of other reasons, too", not "so remote work is still the problem".
GalenErso 4y ago
The most pressing problem with WFH is national security work, which requires government employees to come on site to work in secure facilities. Think CIA analysts in charge of producing reports on Russian troop movements based on signal intercepts and satellite imagery. IMO these positions should pay more than private sector equivalents (if they exist) and cover all commuting costs, but I don't know to what extent these perks are within the discretion of agencies or Congress.
- everdrive 4y ago
  This will never, ever happen. The salary scale for federal national security jobs are set by Congress.
- nunez 4y ago
  those jobs were never wfh to begin with.
analog31 4y ago
I think it's pitting worker vs worker. The "base" perceives govt workers as different from themselves. Divide and conquer.
- Loughla 4y ago
  Bingo. Federal employees are part of the 'deep state' at worst, and bureaucratic bloat at best. They are part of the 'other' to the republican base. My experience in flyover republican country is that anything that makes a government agency worse, or makes a government worker less happy is good, because it can help bolster the private industry alternative (but complaining about the private alternatives, or wait times at government buildings is perfectly okay).
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    > My experience in flyover republican country is that anything that makes a government agency worse, or makes a government worker less happy is good, because it can help bolster the private industry alternative And that's at best! For many, the cruelty of making their perceived opponent less happy (without any benefit to oneself) is sufficient motivation for them to support policy. Policy as a tool to "hurt people"[1]. 1: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
  - kansface 4y ago
    The better solution would be to locate government agencies in red states so they are staffed with representative employees who are at least theoretically sympathetic to their values. Those agencies would cease to be a perennial target for sabotage because no one wants to legislate away X jobs from their state. I would go so far as to allow any federal employee to be allowed to legally work in any State … which feels quite American to me. After all, why should any State or district be elevated above its peers in regards to governance of the whole?
    - analog31 4y ago
      Some of this is already done. For one thing, it's a way to spread funding around. I have a friend who was a higher-up at a Federal agency that had its offices in Ohio. There are state colleges and universities all over the place, and public school teachers are government employees. Hospitals get a lot of public funding. And of course, military facilities. Possibly part of the envy is the disparity in wage visibility. Nobody knows how much people make in the private sector, whereas government salaries are a matter of public record, and can seem high relative to a sub-living-wage job, while also having "cadillac" benefits, reasonable job security, and comfortable working conditions. I've read (and probably seen) that there are large regions of the Midwest where the only towns with any appreciable prosperity either have a college or a hospital, or both.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Ironic - since the house only works 146 days per year - so either gets paid to work half the year - or is doing a lot of remote work...
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Yes, they're doing a lot of remote-ish work; they go home to their districts. Each has offices (usually several) where they can meet with constituents; it's often the best way to get weird issues with dense organizations like the IRS or Medicare resolved.
- kmonsen 4y ago
  You have to understand that is different. It's not emir work but rather getting in touch with their constituents. Sorry if /s and sorry if not. They do have special work which by definition is in two locations.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  Even worse, many of them don't even show up to vote during their limited days anyway[0] [0]https://www.propublica.org/article/the-dog-ate-my-vote-how-congress-explains-its-absences https://www.propublica.org/article/the-dog-ate-my-vote-how-c...
5555624 4y ago
> The federal government encourages remote working, and has for many years In the D.C. area, that's true. When we were moved out of the area, more than five years ago, one of the first things we were told was that we would not be able to telework as often as we had. When the pandemic it, we went to essentially full-time telework; but, we've been back in the office three or four days a week for a year and a half.
_8j50 4y ago
To their voters, they are showing contempt towards federal government employers who are all in their deluded minds lazy because they don't waste time in traffic.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker Blue-collar workers without the option of working remote may perceive working for home differently than we do. Not saying it's close to correct. Just that the politics of this bill make sense.
- relaunched 4y ago
  That logic suggests that blue-collar workers have contempt for anyone that isn't a blue-collar worker. Is there any evidence to support that?
  - floor2 4y ago
    There is no such "contempt". You're misunderstanding the world view of middle-America. Their motivations, however misplaced and due to misunderstandings, are about fairness, justice and functioning government. The simple truth is that, to many Americans, the idea of "working from home" means "not really working". They believe that people in the office will do real work, whereas those same people at home won't. It's a wrong and harmful worldview, but it's not malicious or coming from a place of contempt. A solid "never attribute to malice ..." moment.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      At a certain point, someone being willfully ignorant crosses into malice. We live in a world with the internet and a flight to whatever US city you want for $500. If you aren't willing to learn about the world, that's on you. If you aren't able to conceive of the idea that people in different situations might do things different to you, you aren't "ignorant" or "stupid", you are a child who hasn't developed one of the basic parts of your brain.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > We live in a world with the internet and a flight to whatever US city you want for $500. If you aren't willing to learn about the world, that's on you. This is an ironically contemptuous view. One, five hundred dollars isn’t nothing. Two, that doesn’t include lodging, meals, et cetera, all of which make visiting a city prohibitively expensive for many American families.
bilsbie 4y ago
Or save a step and don’t hire them to begin with.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
null0ranje 4y ago
It also reduces the amount of commercial office space GSA has to lease/manage.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker. I disagree, they're playing into their base well from a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality perspective. Much of their base associates remote working with pandemic measures, which they believe were unnecessary and exaggerated. They associate the types of jobs that can be done remotely as jobs belonging to "coastal elites"/liberal tech workers/pampered college grads/government employees who belong to the swamp/etc. Those exist in contrast to the perceived base of "real" workers, whose jobs are likely physical and can't be done remotely, and who feel strongly about pandemic mitigations. Their response to workers who are hesitant to work in-person is that "the pandemic is over, it's time to go back to work", and workers who want to remain remote are painted as lazy, insubordinate and entitled parasites. In effect, this bill is hurting the "right" people and there are plenty of constituents who want to use the legal system to do just that: stick it to the people they don't like. Taking away privileges from government employees does exactly that.
- metacritic12 4y ago
  This makes a lot more sense. Whenever you have to choose between Theory A: the other side is evil / hateful and Theory B: the other side is optimizing their self-interest (in this case getting elected by their base), Theory B seems to be the more correct and useful one.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    False dichotomy. Why not both?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pohl 4y ago
  > reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker. I disagree...this bill is hurting the "right" people and there are plenty of constituents who want to use the legal system to do just that: stick it to the people they don't like. This reads to me more like an elaboration on the above rather than a disagreement with it. After all, the "right people" being hurt are, in fact, American workers.
jorblumesea 4y ago
> All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker. Is this surprising? Seems completely on brand.
jfengel 4y ago
Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker The American government worker in particular. They've spent decades repeating Reagan's line: “The top 9 most terrifying words in the English Language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Government workers are the enemy, and they want to ensure that they're maximally ineffective so that they can remain the enemy.

Someone1234 4y ago

Yep. Better for car pollution, better for urban house prices, better for the cost of gas, better for families/kids, and better for rural communities (as people move out of cities, and take their relatively high salaries/disposable income with them). It does cause a short term shift as downtown support businesses (e.g. coffee shops, food, etc) have to move closer to where people live. But that is largely a return to what was normal 50 years ago anyway.

bboygravity 4y ago
But what about the team leader/manager's egos though?
- jcpst 4y ago
  Ah yes. That is the one benefit of the SHOW UP act- it does help the ego of managers.
  - toss1 4y ago
    >> it does help the ego of managers. Fix:: ... the ego of BAD managers I read some studies from a decade before COVID about remote work, and the upshot was that teams under previously under-performing managers indeed performed worse, but the previously higher-performing teams performed better. Makes sense because bad managers manage to the signs of work, not work itself - it the but in the chair, not talking to someone else, etc., whereas the good managers manage to their targets and DGAF about the signs. Send the poor manager's teams remote, and now they not only lack direction on real goals, but now they're also free of being hounded. Send the top managers' teams remote, and they have the same guidance, but less time and effort squandered commuting, less office interruptions, etc, and they improve. Considering the studies and recent experience, I'd almost consider it a test of a manager's skill - if they cannot manage a remote team productively, they cannot manage a local one. (Of course meanwhile, the right wing has gone fully into abusive leader attitude over any facts, and so squanders Congress' time with nonsense like this. Ugh) (Edit: typo)
- saghm 4y ago
  Good point, discouraging micromanaging and flaunting power is another benefit they didn't list
luckylion 4y ago
Worse for rural house prices though, right?
- sgt101 4y ago
  There's a lot of rural out there..
bobulous 4y ago
remote work is great but moving to a rural area or suburb is not better for the environment
- Someone1234 4y ago
  Wasn't something that was claimed. Reducing driving in better for the environment.
- atonse 4y ago
  Is that as cut and dry? Me living in a suburb is only "far away" if I have to commute somewhere far away daily. But if I barely drive ever, and work entirely remote, is it so bad to live in a suburb? Genuinely wondering.
  - mjmahone17 4y ago
    It’s not so bad if you are in fact walking most places and spending less time in a car. True it’s better than commuting somewhere far, but if you compare to living without a car in an urban core, it’s unlikely your footprint is smaller. Especially if you now live in a 3,500 square foot detached single story home that consumes a lot of heating energy, whereas in a city you’d have say 1,500 square feet with two shared walls and a shared ceiling/floor (basically you have a larger footprint based on insulation and exposed surface area). The problem is most US towns and suburbs are not set up to be core walkable, dense places, where you don’t even need a car to get home. There are exceptions (I can think of some Hudson Valley towns on train stations, where their core has mixed use multi-story attached housing), but that’s not the norm and is generally discouraged via zoning.
    - atonse 4y ago
      Totally true. And as I think about this more, I'm not thinking enough about other impacts of that sprawl: Sure, I'm not driving as much, but that's because I'm getting a lot of things delivered to me, so SOMEONE is driving around a lot on my behalf (and I'm having to pay for it too). Although with package deliveries, the impact is amortized by all the packages so the impact is probably less than if I had driven to the store, this isn't true of grocery and food deliveries. Those are about as inefficient as would be if I did that driving myself. The approach of thinking about suburbs/city/etc will all have to account for the new hybrid lifestyle of remote work now – where people are living in remote areas but still not driving that much either.
danaris 4y ago
Noting that I fully support remote work... Your last point does have a pretty big caveat, in that widespread strict residential zoning outright prohibits almost every kind of useful support business from setting up shop close enough to where many people live (that is, in the suburbs). The answer to this, of course, is "so let's get rid of that hopelessly strict zoning, which is bad for a host of other reasons, too", not "so remote work is still the problem".

GalenErso 4y ago

The most pressing problem with WFH is national security work, which requires government employees to come on site to work in secure facilities. Think CIA analysts in charge of producing reports on Russian troop movements based on signal intercepts and satellite imagery. IMO these positions should pay more than private sector equivalents (if they exist) and cover all commuting costs, but I don't know to what extent these perks are within the discretion of agencies or Congress.

everdrive 4y ago
This will never, ever happen. The salary scale for federal national security jobs are set by Congress.
nunez 4y ago
those jobs were never wfh to begin with.

analog31 4y ago

I think it's pitting worker vs worker. The "base" perceives govt workers as different from themselves. Divide and conquer.

Loughla 4y ago
Bingo. Federal employees are part of the 'deep state' at worst, and bureaucratic bloat at best. They are part of the 'other' to the republican base. My experience in flyover republican country is that anything that makes a government agency worse, or makes a government worker less happy is good, because it can help bolster the private industry alternative (but complaining about the private alternatives, or wait times at government buildings is perfectly okay).
- ryandrake 4y ago
  > My experience in flyover republican country is that anything that makes a government agency worse, or makes a government worker less happy is good, because it can help bolster the private industry alternative And that's at best! For many, the cruelty of making their perceived opponent less happy (without any benefit to oneself) is sufficient motivation for them to support policy. Policy as a tool to "hurt people"[1]. 1: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
- kansface 4y ago
  The better solution would be to locate government agencies in red states so they are staffed with representative employees who are at least theoretically sympathetic to their values. Those agencies would cease to be a perennial target for sabotage because no one wants to legislate away X jobs from their state. I would go so far as to allow any federal employee to be allowed to legally work in any State … which feels quite American to me. After all, why should any State or district be elevated above its peers in regards to governance of the whole?
  - analog31 4y ago
    Some of this is already done. For one thing, it's a way to spread funding around. I have a friend who was a higher-up at a Federal agency that had its offices in Ohio. There are state colleges and universities all over the place, and public school teachers are government employees. Hospitals get a lot of public funding. And of course, military facilities. Possibly part of the envy is the disparity in wage visibility. Nobody knows how much people make in the private sector, whereas government salaries are a matter of public record, and can seem high relative to a sub-living-wage job, while also having "cadillac" benefits, reasonable job security, and comfortable working conditions. I've read (and probably seen) that there are large regions of the Midwest where the only towns with any appreciable prosperity either have a college or a hospital, or both.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

Ironic - since the house only works 146 days per year - so either gets paid to work half the year - or is doing a lot of remote work...

ceejayoz 4y ago
Yes, they're doing a lot of remote-ish work; they go home to their districts. Each has offices (usually several) where they can meet with constituents; it's often the best way to get weird issues with dense organizations like the IRS or Medicare resolved.
kmonsen 4y ago
You have to understand that is different. It's not emir work but rather getting in touch with their constituents. Sorry if /s and sorry if not. They do have special work which by definition is in two locations.
jimbob45 4y ago
Even worse, many of them don't even show up to vote during their limited days anyway[0] [0]https://www.propublica.org/article/the-dog-ate-my-vote-how-congress-explains-its-absences https://www.propublica.org/article/the-dog-ate-my-vote-how-c...

5555624 4y ago

> The federal government encourages remote working, and has for many years In the D.C. area, that's true. When we were moved out of the area, more than five years ago, one of the first things we were told was that we would not be able to telework as often as we had. When the pandemic it, we went to essentially full-time telework; but, we've been back in the office three or four days a week for a year and a half.

_8j50 4y ago

To their voters, they are showing contempt towards federal government employers who are all in their deluded minds lazy because they don't waste time in traffic.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker Blue-collar workers without the option of working remote may perceive working for home differently than we do. Not saying it's close to correct. Just that the politics of this bill make sense.

relaunched 4y ago
That logic suggests that blue-collar workers have contempt for anyone that isn't a blue-collar worker. Is there any evidence to support that?
- floor2 4y ago
  There is no such "contempt". You're misunderstanding the world view of middle-America. Their motivations, however misplaced and due to misunderstandings, are about fairness, justice and functioning government. The simple truth is that, to many Americans, the idea of "working from home" means "not really working". They believe that people in the office will do real work, whereas those same people at home won't. It's a wrong and harmful worldview, but it's not malicious or coming from a place of contempt. A solid "never attribute to malice ..." moment.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    At a certain point, someone being willfully ignorant crosses into malice. We live in a world with the internet and a flight to whatever US city you want for $500. If you aren't willing to learn about the world, that's on you. If you aren't able to conceive of the idea that people in different situations might do things different to you, you aren't "ignorant" or "stupid", you are a child who hasn't developed one of the basic parts of your brain.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > We live in a world with the internet and a flight to whatever US city you want for $500. If you aren't willing to learn about the world, that's on you. This is an ironically contemptuous view. One, five hundred dollars isn’t nothing. Two, that doesn’t include lodging, meals, et cetera, all of which make visiting a city prohibitively expensive for many American families.

bilsbie 4y ago

Or save a step and don’t hire them to begin with.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

null0ranje 4y ago

It also reduces the amount of commercial office space GSA has to lease/manage.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker. I disagree, they're playing into their base well from a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality perspective. Much of their base associates remote working with pandemic measures, which they believe were unnecessary and exaggerated. They associate the types of jobs that can be done remotely as jobs belonging to "coastal elites"/liberal tech workers/pampered college grads/government employees who belong to the swamp/etc. Those exist in contrast to the perceived base of "real" workers, whose jobs are likely physical and can't be done remotely, and who feel strongly about pandemic mitigations. Their response to workers who are hesitant to work in-person is that "the pandemic is over, it's time to go back to work", and workers who want to remain remote are painted as lazy, insubordinate and entitled parasites. In effect, this bill is hurting the "right" people and there are plenty of constituents who want to use the legal system to do just that: stick it to the people they don't like. Taking away privileges from government employees does exactly that.

metacritic12 4y ago
This makes a lot more sense. Whenever you have to choose between Theory A: the other side is evil / hateful and Theory B: the other side is optimizing their self-interest (in this case getting elected by their base), Theory B seems to be the more correct and useful one.
- r00fus 4y ago
  False dichotomy. Why not both?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pohl 4y ago
> reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker. I disagree...this bill is hurting the "right" people and there are plenty of constituents who want to use the legal system to do just that: stick it to the people they don't like. This reads to me more like an elaboration on the above rather than a disagreement with it. After all, the "right people" being hurt are, in fact, American workers.

jorblumesea 4y ago

> All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker. Is this surprising? Seems completely on brand.

jfengel 4y ago

Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker The American government worker in particular. They've spent decades repeating Reagan's line: “The top 9 most terrifying words in the English Language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Government workers are the enemy, and they want to ensure that they're maximally ineffective so that they can remain the enemy.