During the UK lockdown, home working has soared. But struggles with childcare, pay and conditions aren’t new

In the early 1970s, futurologists began to reimagine the relationship between home and workplace. A new wave of technological innovation seemed to be pushing together the private and public worlds that the Industrial Revolution had rent apart.

Networked computers installed in an employee’s home would revolutionise the modern corporation. Teleworking – as it became known – would free humanity from the grind of the daily commute, enabling an easier blend of work and family life.

Nearly 50 years on, elements of this vision have now become a reality for millions of us. According to the Office for National Statistics, only 5% of the UK labour force worked mainly from home in 2019, but well over a quarter had some experience of home-working. In recent weeks, that figure has dramatically increased as a result of the lockdown measures implemented to tackle the spread of Covid-19. With all but key workers confined to their homes, the virtual office is now the new norm – a development that could prove to have far-reaching consequences. Is telework an idea whose time has finally come?

 In facilitating non-standard employment, the rise of teleworking played its part in fostering our gig economy

Looking to the past can help us to answer this question. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were plenty of reasons to be excited about the possibilities of telework. Some analysts hoped that less commuting would reduce western capitalism’s dependence on fossil fuels. Others foresaw a revitalisation of local neighbourhoods, with dormitory suburbs transformed into thriving communities of home-workers. Teleworking seemed to hold the key to equality for women with young children, who could hold on to hard-won careers thanks to more flexible regimes of home-based employment. One early adopter was the software company F International, organised on a remote-working model from the outset. Its founder, Stephanie “Steve” Shirley, seized the opportunity to recruit highly skilled female programmers whose careers had stalled following marriage and motherhood.

Yet there were also reasons to be sceptical. Trade unionists feared that telework was just another ploy by employers to cut wage bills and erode workers’ rights. Some firms recruited teleworkers as self-employed contractors, thus shirking responsibility for pensions, sick pay and maternity leave, as well as neatly sidestepping health and safety laws. In the early 1980s, the office supplies company Rank Xerox restructured its UK operations by engaging former employees as “independent” subcontractors who undertook to do a substantial amount of work for the company and to buy its equipment. Other firms offered loans to teleworkers for the purchase of computers, thus ensuring that their self-employment status could not be called into question. In facilitating the spread of these forms of non-standard employment, the rise of teleworking played its part in fostering our present-day gig economy.

Yet despite these cost-cutting advantages for companies, many managers were resistant to remote working and adopted it with extreme caution. A congregated workforce could be directly monitored, incentivised and disciplined, but supervising at distance posed new challenges. For teleworkers, continuous surveillance was swapped for carefully negotiated “deliverables” and payment by results, while only those deemed to have the right “personality” were extended the privilege of working from home. In 1990, a senior civil servant compiled a formidable list of necessary attributes for prospective teleworkers in his department. They included: “self-motivation and discipline; the ability to work without direct supervision; the ability to cope with minimal social contact and be self-reliant … the ability to cope with any additional stress from dealing with work at the same time as domestic responsibilities.”

Few were able to tick all the boxes. One professional writer, previously an enthusiast for home-working, described his struggle to maintain boundaries amid the everyday noise and chatter of family life: “How do you explain to a two-year-old that Daddy in the kitchen making a cup of coffee is thinking about his next paragraph and is not to be interrupted?” Women, by contrast, tended to accept these domestic conflicts as the price they paid for clinging on to the threads of a career. Female teleworkers were less likely to have a dedicated workspace or a spouse on hand to keep children at bay, and generally received lower salaries than their office-bound peers. As the campaigner and expert Ursula Huws archly put it, men felt the absence of “the masculinity-confirming buddy-world of the workplace”. But for women without reliable childcare, it was often a choice between inferior pay and conditions as a teleworker or not working at all.

Much of this history will resonate with frazzled parents currently housebound with children under the coronavirus lockdown. Business gurus originally sold teleworking as a lifestyle choice, conjuring images of “electronic cottages” insulated from dreary commutes and constricting office routines. The reality of remote home-working, however, was – and remains still – more complicated.

The Covid-19 crisis is helping to shine a light on both the pleasures and pressures of having the home as your office. Jumping from a Zoom meeting to a lazy game with the kids in the garden might seem like a template for the good life, but home-working does not exist apart from wider social and economic equalities. Achieving job security, control at work and time for a life outside of it is as pressing a problem today as it was for pioneer teleworkers in the late-20th century. If working from home is our post-coronavirus future, let’s not forget its complex past.

 Helen McCarthy - Article printed in The Guardian