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Australians fight for the right to work from home permanently
- trainthanksu 3y ago[dead]
- Bostonian 3y agoWFH policies should be between the employer and employee and not be set by the government. If an employer wants everyone in the office 5 days a week and is willing to pay enough to get such employees, the government should not interfere.
- codesnik 3y agoand if employer wants everyone in the factory for 14 hours 7 days a week, well...
- CamperBob2 3y agoWell... then they can pay for it.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoThey do pay for it in Bangladesh or other countries.
- RGamma 3y agoSays the 35h/w white collar rich guy.
- CamperBob2 3y ago"Stereotyping: It's OK When We Do it!"
- shortcrct 3y agoI wouldn't see the issue here if the employer was willing to "pay handsomely" to have their employees work those hours. Some white collar workers work those hours every week - if not longer - and are paid well for it.
- rconti 3y agoFunny how "paying handsomely" turns into a race to the bottom.
- randomdata 3y agoIt is, indeed, fascinating how little respect workers have for each other. Any little concession they can offer an employer to screw over the guy beside them, they will take it. Unionization helps develop somewhat of a brotherhood to keep the nastiness at bay, but even then the members generally want to keep it an exclusive club, not something for all workers to join. As a result even union members still see external pressure from the workers outside of the union still trying to them screw over.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago>Unionization helps develop somewhat of a brotherhood to keep the nastiness at bay, No, being comprised of humans, it absolutely doesn’t.
- birdyrooster 3y agoThe only person paying handsomely (hastening their illness and death) is the one working 7 days a week for 14 hours.
- plagiarist 3y agoActually I'd prefer OSHA set some sane limits on hours worked instead of assuming an Invisible Hand will stop employers from working laborers to death.
- HPsquared 3y agoNobody will sign up for that job.
- Flipflip79 3y agoThat’s an incredibly privileged point of view, with all due respect.
- Noumenon72 3y agoI worked in a plastic factory in a small rural town that always struggled to find workers. People will refuse work and prefer poverty for a lot less than 14-7 working conditions. Lacking air conditioning is enough.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoWith all due respect, so is equivocating having to sit in the car for an hour with the desperation of choosing between starving and a long work week
- Flipflip79 3y agoNot sure where I even remotely did that? The comment above was my only contribution to this thread. It’s an isolated reply to the comment I replied to
- s1artibartfast 3y agoYou didnt. I was making an additional contribution which related to yours and the parent post. Both are extremely privileged and ignorant positions. That nobody would work 70 hour weeks, and that going into an office is a comparable struggle.
- chrstphrknwtn 3y agoThere are plenty of people who find themselves in desperate enough situations to be taken advantage of in such a way. It is for that reason that things like social welfare and employment regulation exist today.
- Bostonian 3y agoCommuting to work 5 days a week is not a health hazard. Most people did it before the pandemic.
- katbyte 3y agoAnd many died in car crashes and other accidents on their commute https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/reasons-to-take-the-train-to-work-instead-of-dying/ https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/reasons-to-take-the-...
- mullingitover 3y agoDriving is the most dangerous activity that the average person engages in. Just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s safe.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoNo, eating is.
- perhonen 3y agothere's got to be a reasonable point on the spectrum between "child labor is legal" and "government mandates color of post-it notes in offices" if a company decides they function best with all their employees in the same physical space, and hires with that condition as an explicit criteria for working there, do you really think that's a violation of human rights?
- 1270018080 3y agoA reasonable point on the spectrum between "child labor is legal" and "government mandates color of post-it notes in offices" is "People should be allowed to work from home for a job that can be done from home"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- papercrane 3y agoThe article isn't about government regulations. It's about employee unions making agreements with the employers for WFH policies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- majormajor 3y ago> Before COVID-19 sent one-third of the global workforce home, the Melbourne property surveyor that employs drone operator Nicholas Coomber called its 180-strong staff into the office every day at 9 a.m. to hand out assignments. > Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare earlier than before the pandemic. The example here seems like a particularly stupid (from the company POV, even) place to put an in-office mandate. Clearly much of the actual work was never happening in the office anyway. Overall what the article describes seems pretty similar to what's happening in a lot of companies in the US (and globally, as the article notes), though with more unions involved than in the US. Bosses are much more likely to want 5 days in the office than employees, negotiation over how many days, etc. A lot of work certainly doesn't need 5 days a week in office.
- jacobwilliamroy 3y agoI actually prefer going to work. Being out of the house for 5 days a week really helps to reduce the utility bill. Also I hate being at home. Nothing good ever happens there.
- mulletbum 3y agoInteresting, I and all of my neighbors disagree. Thankfully the whole conversation has nothing to do with one person.
- jacobwilliamroy 3y agoI just think it's important to remember that not everyone is rich enough to have a home environment that's as good or better than the one at work. And also consider that the company bears a lot of expenses by having people work on-site and I rarely see discussions of who is going to be paying those bills or how that's supposed to work.
- pessimizer 3y ago
- Barrin92 3y agowhat the resistance to WFH makes explicit is that when companies hire workers they don't really conceive of it as buying their labour, they conceive of it as taking control of them for eight hours and dictating how they have to behave. That's the real reason why WFH faces so much resistance. When people are done with their work they can just play with their kid or do what they want, and it becomes obvious how much, using Foucault's analogy, of a prison aimed to discipline the office is.
- unshavedyak 3y agoI also think it shows how insufficient some management is. They coast on "butt in seats" and call it management. Being forced to actually monitor and assess work is a chore they previously skipped. Likewise ensuring that staff are properly utilized is another chore often skipped and them being remote forces you to acknowledge and confront this reality.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoAnd no doubt they live in fear of employees actually being productive and efficient without their personal supervision. Suddenly they seem redundant.
- IshKebab 3y agoThat's not the reason. Very few people who can work from home can be "done with their work". As far as I can tell the real reasons are some combination of: * Working physically next to people generally is more efficient. Of course there are some people like Knuth who need to be undisturbed for 6 hours, but for most people the ease of communicating in the real world is a big time saver. It really is. * The benefit of face to face meetings is bigger the more meetings you have and the more talking to people your job involves. Guess how many meetings the people making these decisions have... * You're less likely to spend time doing house chores and whatever. I generally do a solid day's work when WFH but even I sometimes just mow the lawn or whatever. If I was at work I would probably just read HN on my phone instead but I obviously hide that better. So this isn't a good reason IMO but it is a reason. * Companies don't like paying for fancy offices that nobody is using. * It isn't the company that pays for the time and cost of your commute, so to them that is not a downside. I wouldn't ever work for a company that didn't let me WFH again. The lack of commute is just too good. But I do understand the real reasons why high up managers don't like it.
- Terr_ 3y agoAside: I sometimes see stuff like "employees are 10% less productive from home." [0] However that's somewhat misleading, the "productivity" does NOT mean physics-style efficiency of human effort to create value and fight entropy... No, it's based on what employers had to spend. So slaves that only produce a quarter as much per day are technically "more productive." This matters because employers that require unnecessary time/fuel for commutes typically don't pay for it. Out of tradition and negotiating-power, those costs are usually shoved off onto employees and are not being tracked. If commuting to the office was compensated, the "productivity" differences with work-from-home would be dramatically flipped. [0] Example: https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productive-wfh-research/ https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productiv...
- closeparen 3y agoIf employers were in fact willing to swing major policy and spending decisions based on +/- 10% knowledge worker efficiency, offices would look very different.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoThey'd be empty. God I hate Thursdays at the office, too many meetings, day broken in a bajillion pieces, and I can't get anything done.
- plagiarist 3y agoI bet I would be 10% faster if I skipped all the nonsense meetings and standups.
- maerF0x0 3y agoBut it's net output that matters, not individual. If your 10% loss is a 2% gain on 10 ppl then it's a win.
- plagiarist 3y agoI can promise you the standups are not a 2% gain for 10 other people, most participants are losing efficiency compared to making async announcements of their work in a shared text communication space.
- j-bos 3y agoOne line I can't square with mandatory returns to office is that the same orgs and agencies requiring employees in office are also waving big flags about going green and fighting climate change. Has anyone seen a justification for the disconnect?
- quacked 3y agoClimate change is a luxury belief that people wave to get federal funding or social points. Living a true low-emissions lifestyle (not one where you consume exactly as much as you did before except EVs instead of gas cars) is a serious handicap in the modern economy.
- delecti 3y agoThe simplest explanation is that they want the positive reputation from going green, but don't actually care about the effects.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoEasy. It is all about making your life poorer. The wealthy will continue to drive and fly but you and me will have to walk from the sleeping pod to the working pod. You don't see the WEF walking to Davos do you?
- barbazoo 3y ago> One line I can't square with mandatory returns to office is that the same orgs and agencies requiring employees in office are also waving big flags about going green and fighting climate change. Has anyone seen a justification for the disconnect? The type of argument > It's hypocritical that they [group A] are the ones doing [some thing] but at the same time also being the ones [group B] doing [another thing] with groups A and B being independent of each other often irks me. Who says they are actually the same people? What is this line of thought called, that must be a named fallacy of some kind.
- l33t233372 3y agoI don’t understand why you separate groups A and B. The comment said that it’s the same orgs and agencies doing both things.
- travisgriggs 3y agoI'm migrating to a mixed mode. And glad to be able to. One of the nagging questions/worries I have about the increase in WFH is greener employees. I've entertained summer interns for the last 11 years at work. And I've tried to help some older but newer-to-programming peers. I can take "experienced" contractors/helpers up to speed in one of the many domains I have to work in pretty quick. Share some code. Some chats/emails. Couple desktop shares, it's usually enough to bootstrap an ongoing remote conversation. With younger/newer/greener people, I have found this to be nigh impossible though. I don't like the optics of "you need to get some experience before you can work from home" and it also begs the question "who's going to show up in office to do the mentoring." I do see this as a problem that's not getting addressed.
- Vicinity9635 3y agoThe last place I worked had full WFH and used Tuple (not affiliated) and it worked great for ramp-up and onboarding. It basically lets you pair program where you and a remote person can control your computer (or theirs) more or less completely and seamlessly. There are competing products too, but that was the nicest I've used. I tried it at my new job with a colleague in Brazil (I'm in US) and the performance was awful as it seemed to be routing it through the VPN for some reason. My point is though, good pair programming software might be the solution. Zoom is inadequate in my professional opinion, though it's almost viable. Knowing how much better it could be it falls short.
- travisgriggs 3y agoFor the mentoring experiences I've had, being able to observe the newer person allows me to make observations that can help them a lot. I don't need to tell more experienced people how to use their tools (shortcuts, etc) to be 10x happier. But newer employees would never know to ask that, and it's hard to pick up on those nuanced details without having them sitting across the bullpen, periodically sitting next to them, going to the whiteboard, etc.
- Vicinity9635 3y ago
- slashdev 3y agoI’ve worked at home my whole career. First by necessity and then by choice. If I happened to live in the same city as my job, I’d be happy to come in one or two days a week. But I’d never accept having to come into the office every day. I hate driving in traffic and I don’t get much done in the office. Working remote has let me live and travel wherever I want. I’m planning a three to six month working vacation to Asia / Australia for near the end of the year. I currently live in a cheap cost of living location, with extremely low taxes, near family, and work in a high salary location. Best of all worlds.
- imperfect_light 3y agoI wish that "working remote" translated into "live and travel wherever I want" for everyone. So many companies now have policies that restrict where you work from for tax/payroll purposes, or because they don't want employees working in country where the employee doesn't have the proper visa (even if working for a US company).
- doitLP 3y agoEasy. Just don’t tell them. They only care if they officially have to.
- radiator 3y agoI like this. Don't ask, don't tell. Occasionally someone might notice that your IP address seems to be in a foreign coutry, though.
- the_lucifer 3y ago“You see, I’ve become a connoisseur of using VPNs at exotic locations. But pinky promise I’m home”
- slashdev 3y agoYup, this. Plus it makes your coworkers jealous when you're in a different exotic locale every week, and that's not helpful.
- coding123 3y agoI am so glad grocery store stockers can work from home now. Amazon workers too, a robot will send the package to the Amazon workers home so they can re-package it in a box and ship it via regularly scheduled pickups from the UPS and Fedex workers that work from home. (Their home, of course, is the Fifth Wheel the company is giving them to do deliveries from)
- l33t233372 3y agoI’m confused what point you’re making here. Is it that some (non office) jobs require you to be there?
- coding123 3y agoIt's a statement that will be the joke when this passes as law and leaves out everyone else.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoThe point as I see it is that a job's requirements are what an employer wants the employee to do. All of these argument about WFH seem to assume a job's real requirements should be something different. A good example is people talk about companies wanting in person work to drive their real-estate value, ect. The obvious answer is "OK, so thats the job they are paying you for"
- toomuchtodo 3y agoI'm unsure what the disgruntlement is with these efforts. Job requirements can be modified to accommodate the desires and needs of a labor force. That is what regulation, laws, and unions are for. Jobs that must be done in person will still be done in person, jobs that can be done remotely may be empowered to be done remotely. Employment is a negotiation, not edict from nobility. Maybe you have to prove the job can't be done remotely as an employer. That is a reasonable requirement.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- maerF0x0 3y ago> "If they were to say 'everyone back in the office', I would probably be asking for a raise," said Coomber, who still visits the office once or twice a week. "You get more family time. You can actually finish work at five, rather than finishing at five spending 45 minutes trying to get home." I'm all for work from home, I think it's actually worth a pay decrease[1], but this quote is a form of double dipping. Presumably Coomber didnt take a pay cut when the pandemic began and they started working from home. I guess it depends on the circumstances during offer/negotiations. That being said, most US contracts more or less say the employer can change your job duties to whatever they want, without any requirement to change your pay. That could include coming to the office, working longer hours, and cleaning the toilets -- if they can get away with it. As far as I know the primary tool by which workers have caused meaningful changes in the workplace are 1) Negotiations on initial offer and 2) Refusing to continue to work for an employer under terms that are no longer their BATNA . [1]: I think its actually a mutually beneficial arrangement, at least for me and many of my colleagues we're simply more able to contribute -- from focus, quiet, being able to spend commute time working (reduced stress) etc. The employer is getting a better worker with less office space overhead. Naturally this is highly variable to the job, a work from home ER nurse probably doesnt make sense. But for many it does.
- dahwolf 3y agoQuite a few companies are somewhat reasonable and steering towards a hybrid model where people come in 1-3 days a week. The unexplored outcome of hybrid is that there's no such thing as hybrid. In a hybrid model, you come into the office and find people sitting in chairs with a headphone on. Because they're just as much in calls as they were at home. Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there. Hence, this nice physical face-to-face meeting, a supposed benefit of returning to the office, does not materialize. Well, perhaps you'll at least do some ad-hoc brainstorming with your colleague at the coffee machine. Sure, but you need to put the outcome of that in writing...for the people that are not there. Hence, this mode of virtual working cannot be undone. You can't do a "little" virtual working. When you come into the office you largely continue to work as if from home. Perhaps without the sweatpants. For the record, I'm not anti-office. I enjoy the socializing, lunch walks, etc. And in our increasingly touchless home-based society, it's not that bad of a deal to get out of the house for 2 or 3 days a week. Finally, we should empathize with juniors. In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing.
- Terr_ 3y ago> Because part of the meeting participants on any given day is not there. That's not the only possible "hybrid" model though. The one where multiple large companies (or company-like divisions) are time-sharing the same facility, so that for any workday it's either 100% of the group present or 0% of the group present. I'm not saying it'll prove practical or popular, but it does avoid the "there's always somebody missing from the meeting" issue.
- leetcrew 3y agothere is absolutely such a thing as hybrid. it just requires that everyone picks the same 1-3 days to be in office.
- therein 3y ago> In my experience, remote mentoring is a piss poor substitute for the real thing. This is very true. Probably the biggest contributor to my career were the first two internships I have had. I can't imagine having them done virtually over Slack and Zoom and still having the same impact and connection, it would be devoid of an essential sense of belonging and inspiration.
- hkon 3y agoUse the climate change and green argument for all that it's worth. Good that it can be used for something other than increasing taxes.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI think framing it as a right is misleading. Working from home is simply a contract perk like compensation subject to contract negotiation. It makes sense that workers would want it, just like they would want a 200% higher salary. Individuals with leverage or those in unions can negotiate for it and employers can come to agreements or not.
- manuelabeledo 3y agoIt could be a right. Couple centuries ago, factory workers had to work seven days a week, for a total of seventy hours a week. It is not far fetched that working from home could become a right, like getting some rest came to be.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoCompanies can still hire people to work 70 hours a week perfectly legally. There is no restriction for salaried workers. For hourly workers they just have to pay overtime. I suppose it wouldn't be a huge stretch from current policy for the government to make employers pay workers for their commute time, because it already does similar things, but this is all for our early workers. However, companies with just choose to hire workers that were closer because distance to your job isn't a protected class like race or gender
- AlbertCory 3y agoI've been to Oz on business, twice. People down there, let's say, do not exactly live to work. You can say that's how it ought to be, and you might well be right, but that's how it's always been. YMMV.
- stephenr 3y agoIndividuals with obsessive compulsive "work work work" attitudes exist everywhere but as an Australian (living overseas) it's kind of crazy that "live to work" is considered normal by any large population.
- 000ooo000 3y agoHow can you make a statement about 25 million people like this, leading with "I've been there twice"?
- AlbertCory 3y agoIt's easy. You type it and hit the Reply button.
- 000ooo000 3y agoWell I can't argue with that, can I? :)
- rhuru 3y agoIf you job can be done 100% remotely it can also be done in India.
- stephenr 3y agoI've worked 100% remotely for a decade and a half. Some of that time even working with gasp Indians.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoThen why isn't it done there?
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoHaving worked with teams in India I would disagree. Biggest issue was timezone.
- Phelinofist 3y agoI have three guys living in India in my team and the timezone difference from IST to CE(S)T is not really in issue. We have a standup every second Monday from 10-11am CE(S)T and if other meetings with them are required I schedule them between 9am and 2pm and they get preference for that time over Europe based members.
- topato 3y agoWith, from my experience, a remarkable lack of quality or care. I don't know if it's cultural, but Indian workers often seem completely checked out of their work.
- alephnerd 3y agoDepends on how much you are paying. If your company is working with a contracting/consulting company (eg. Infosys, TCS) then you're not paying enough. Most of those consulting/contracting firms are trying to pay $3-8k/yr when market rate at Product Driven Companies across India is $20-50k/yr now. Even farming pays around $3-8k/yr (especially when factoring that farm income isn't taxed in India). Plenty of American companies are fine paying the true market rate (eg. With returnees from America, Canada, Germany, SG, etc) and haven't had those kinds of issues.
- cubefox 3y agoNot directly commenting on the topic here, but headlines of the form "X fight for the right to Y" seem to presuppose that there is such a moral right, and they are fighting just to bring it into legal recognition. When the question really starts with whether such a moral right exists or not, whether Y should be a legal right. The problem with presuppositions is that they are preserved under negation. Whether you say you are for or against right Y, it seems that you presuppose that right Y exists in some capacity. But that's not what people who are "against" would want to assume, as they are probably denying it.
- beebmam 3y agoA legal right can exist without ethics.
- cubefox 3y agoBut the question of whether something should be a legal right is mostly an ethical one.
- justnotworthit 3y agoAnother way to say is "They don't already have that right?". Can't they already get/negotiate work-from-home jobs voluntarily with other equally free people? I'm not arguing against you, but you're giving the technical, logical explanation to a purposely a-technical and a-logical claim. The vast majority of people (not the ones who think like you or me) simply call the use of force against other people in order to get what they want (the social order they want, etc) "rights", whatever the moral implications (or even practical consequences).
- zuckerborg0101 3y ago[flagged]
- jmyeet 3y agoThe optimist in me hopes this sort of thing will increase class consciousness. Another example going around is billionaire Starwood Capital CEO Barry Sternlicht saying a "nice little recession" will bring people back to the office [1]. Raising interest rates, saddling people with various forms of debt (student, medical, housing) and increasing unemployment are all part of the same strategy to suppress wages and disempower labor. Unions and the importance of labor were largely accepted a century ago. Compare Marx's Labor Theory of Value [2] to this quote from Abraham Lincoln [3]: > Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. What we've seen in recent times is the capital-owning class just coming out and saying the quiet part out loud. Crushing working from home is just another way of extracting even more surplus value from labor. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would literally melt you into bio-matter if there was an uptick in profits. They would starve you and put you out on the street if there was an uptick in profits. I hope more people realize this. Stop defending billionaires. [1]: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/billionaire-ceo-says-remote-workers-just-need-a-nice-little-recession-to-return-to-the-office/ https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/bi... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value [3]: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-9 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-messa...
- missedthecue 3y agoWhat is the relevance of the Abraham Lincoln quote? He is not noted for his economic policy. In fact most presidents of his era had very bad economic policy and engaged in a great deal of protectionism, colonialism, cronyism, and inefficient agricultural subsidies, among other harmful measures.
- jmyeet 3y agoBecause most people don't realize Lincoln was basically a Marxist. The pendulum has swung so far from that norm in the modern day, thanks largely to an Ayn Rand objectivism-fuelled orgy of biollionaire "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" propaganda.
- rsweeney21 3y agoOne overlooked cause of the return to office trend is local tax breaks. Big companies negotiate large tax breaks from city and state governments in exchange for bringing a certain number of jobs to the area. But big companies haven't been delivering the jobs to the area that they promised because employees have been allowed to work remotely. So now they are at risk of huge tax bills.
- vpastore 3y ago[dead]
- brachika 3y agoUnrelated to the WFH dilemma, how is Australia generally for IT and tech workers? I've gotten two invitations to emigrate in the past and although I naively refused, as time goes on I am strongly inclined to at least take the offers into account.