WFH Discussions Are Class Warfare

Real talk time: I barely noticed the beginning of the pandemic and lockdowns because, well, I’ve been work-from-home since about November 2015, when I got terminated from one full-time job as my then-boss drank Diet Coke through a straw for 14 minutes of HR buzzwords being said to me. Because I’ve been work from home for a minute, I didn’t really have any jarring context to that transition. Now, at the time, my fiancee got about two weeks WFH, then had to go back. A girl from church was living with us then, and she worked for a hospital system, so she got like one week and had to go back. Really, not much changed for me.

So it was amusing when I would walk my dog in the morning and you’d see all these breathless hot take articles about working from home, remote work, WFH, and everything associated with it. People were tripping over themselves to write versions of these articles in March and April, and even into May. People were getting “experts” for podcasts, and quoting UChicago research about “how many people can reasonably work from home.” It was honestly exhausting.

The real tea is that work from home is a class-driven system that benefits the already-affluent. I think we all kinda sorta know that, but it’s just a question of how much we can admit it.

A little bit of obvious context

Most of the economy is driven by retail and service sectors. We talk about tech constantly, and tech represents a lot of stock market growth and new companies, but tech employs about 6–8% of the economy, at least in North America. Send Johnny to STEM Camp for five summers if you want; it’s no guarantee of a job.

Well, if you work at a bar or an Arby’s, you cannot work from home. That’s not how things are set up. Zoom Happy Hours can’t replace the concept of owning a bar and having patrons.

Now, here’s a good article on TLNT about the dark side of working from home. I love me some TLNT because I used to work with Vadim, who edits the thing now. He’s a friend of mine at a time when, Jesus, what is friendship even? Can we hug? I digress.

Here’s a good pull quote:

People in senior roles and those with strong networks in their companies feel somewhat unaffected by remote working as they continue to exert influence in the organization, push through ideas, and get heard. One EVP remarked to us, “In some ways WFH feels about the same. My team and I know each other well, and they pretty much know what I want. So I give them my ask and they come back with very good output!” However, those without such a network, either due to lack of rank or tenure, find it difficult to build one. On video calls people tend to interact only with those they know, which inherently alienates those who aren’t already in the network. Over time, this leads to a tightening of existing networks, not an expansion or creation of new ones.

Yep, no doubt. If you have a senior role at your company, that means a few things:

• You make more money.
• People are already used to doing what you say/ask.
• You probably have a bigger house with a dedicated work area.
• Your kids might be a little bit older.
• Potentially your spouse doesn’t work or you have “hired help.”

If you hit these buckets, WFH is relatively cake. And if anything flares up or you need better WiFi, you throw money at the problem. I grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I know that model pretty well.

But if you’re not senior, young kids, smaller home/apartment, no hired help, no dedicated workspace, and two people working … that’s a lot harder.

More people fall into the second bucket than the first one, even though one of our political divisions of the moment is what constitutes “rich.”

PS on the above pull quote, I laughed out loud that an EVP said “great output.” Like, in my mind, the EVP barely knows what the company does, and he’s like “Hey Alicia, I need some output.” Alicia is like “Sure boss, output coming. And it will be great.” The ways we discuss work are such a non-transparent joke.

So yes, work from home is inherently class warfare. And every article that mentions the extension of it quotes which companies? Oh yes. Google, Facebook, Square, Twitter, Pinterest, and sometimes REI gets mentioned in those articles. Those are about 83% “tech-y” (read: advertising platform) companies. The people who are working from home at those companies are largely making $80,000/annually or much more, and they’re often working on code or campaign rollouts, none of which ever really required that much in-office time to begin with.

We can debate about how long WFH will last forever and a day, and about how much people like it, and what might happen to commercial real estate in the process, and all that and a bag of chips … but unless we admit it’s a skewed system that benefits those who already had more resources and income, we aren’t doing the discussion justice.