Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely
theatlantic.comWe just need to make the office an optional place that people can gather when they feel the need to. I have no problem at all working a 5 day 40 hours work week from home. But this nonsense of everyone waking up at the same time, sitting in traffic, and cramming into "open plan" work spaces has to go.
I'm concerned that if we go this route on a permanent basis without a more powerful labor movement, it'll mean that work and home will seamlessly merge. Employer surveillance will enter the home and corporate domination will seep into every pore of our existence... and that's for white collar workers.
If work from home ends up really sticking around, I'm sure plenty of cost-cutting employers will expect everyone to buy their own computers, but expect employees to all install keyloggers and monitoring software in order to work.
And people will accept it, because they'll be fired if they refuse and someone more desperate will deal with it so long as they get paid at some point.
> And people will accept it
I definitely never think about working at any company that wanted employees installing keyloggers. As software engineers thankfully we're in enough demand to where I don't see it getting that extreme, but I could see that scenario for more oversupplied industries. In any case, the requirement of that kind of surveillance software to do one's job should be made illegal.
It's already happened in the freelancing / lower-level software work, time tracking apps and the like are common on upwork.
I hate to always be that guy, but this is the sort of situation in which one might wield the strike, a coordinated worker action, to prevent home spyware from being installed. If you work within a framework of uncoordinated individual action, domination of the individual by the interests of the corporation is the logical result.
I'd like to hope that would happen, but I'm more afraid there'd be media/government complaints of "lazy workers with the privilege of working at home and doing nothing are STRIKING!" and people would eat it up.
There are people out there saying a minimum wage of $7.25 is too high and we should get rid of it entirely. I think in many places, workers would fear they'll lose even more by striking for privacy.
That's true. The anti-union propaganda would be present. The trick is making sure your message gets out there too and emphasizes the contradictions between the employer's desire and power to compel people to submit to invasive surveillance in their own homes and our rights to be free of such invasive measures through relatable stories.
The people that take the side of the employer are broadly the corporate owned media, but when hearing the labor side of the story, the public is often sympathetic because the majority of people are workers, not employers.
> There are people out there saying a minimum wage of $7.25 is too high and we should get rid of it entirely.
Those people are not the ones being subjected to such wages. People's political analysis is largely directed by material self interest. The vast majority of the population is made of precarious workers who resent the people that would say that.
Keyloggers and monitoring software are illegal even on employer issued computers in Germany afaik.
It will all be done in the name of "security" - in this case you don't have to justify or even explain what security issue your are trying to solve. And security software vendors will helpfully lend you an amazingly designed fear-mongering powerpoint.
Even in the name of security you can't take away certain privacy privileges in Germany, as far as I understand the laws.
And those employers will suffer for it by getting sub-standard employee as the competent ones will find jobs at places that don't play big brother.
They could possibly get away with it by paying exceedingly well. But that would afford workarounds, like buying a work-only computer for the spyware to live on.
Maybe if you restrict yourself to programmers. Most office workers probably don't understand the implications of surveillance software and I doubt that many of them would go through the extra effort of using a separate computer.
More likely that they'll just normalize RDP-ing into cloud desktops. I know someone that just joined my company that has to do this while his new work laptop ships.
If WFH becomes permanent on any sort of meaningful basis, outsourcing companies are going to lobby very hard while companies are simultaneously trying to cut costs. People who are enjoying this WFH revolution would do well to think about secondary effects.
Many workplaces have been moving in this direction over the past decade. Not only do employees love it; there are also serious cost savings for employers.
Pretty much everyone wants to go this direction. The problem is that there are still serious hurdles in place -- mainly due to the nature of the work, or cultural/interpersonal challenges.
I think you're living in a bubble if you believe that everyone wants to go into that direction. At least here in Germany, butts in seats is still very important. The only office workers I know who can work from home during the pandemic are programmers. Everyone else still has to go to the office.
I don’t think employees want to waste time commuting and employers want to waste money on real estate.
The reason most people still go to the office is because of the hurdles I mentioned above.
Yes, there is certainly a lot of work can’t be done behind a computer, or workforces that can’t effectively collaborate over a computer. But I don’t think that means they wouldn’t if they could.
Sorry it won't happen. An office packed with humans is all about stroking the CEOs ego. Its just not the same seeing your servants on a screen vs packed together doing the boss's bidding.
I disagree. Although offices can have their downsides, I personally can't work remotely because I find it so cold and boring.
It's all about choice. Employees should be able to work in the environment that is best for their well-being. Happier employees tends to result in increased productivity.
It's also about productivity. If the employee functions significantly worse in a remote position, then extending that to them is going to be often a poor decision.
I feel like I'm struggling with this now: I have fought for a long time to get my team to be fully remote. After a year of partial WFH, now we're doing it full time. However, several people on my team seem completely incapable of self-regulation unless someone is making them show up. They're up at 3am working, but clearly only getting done >5% of what they'd otherwise do. A few others are getting done at least 120% more. Seems like different strokes for different folks is the name of the game, and some people for whatever reason just aren't in a place in their lives where they are responsible enough to handle the greater freedom of remote work.
But closing the office pads the CEO's pocketbook! So some will choose to close offices but others will keep it open. It will probably be divided between companies whose CEO is motivated primarily by money or by motivated by power.
Yes this is true. Employers have so much leverage in this labor market, and nobody ever got promoted in a large corporation for promoting workers' rights.
The only solution seems to be:
1. Universal Basic Income - ie. giving people the freedom to say no to sh*tty jobs rather than being forced to take the least bad offer
2. Make a law that gives employees the right to work remotely if their job can reasonably be done remotely
Is there some new godwin's law that any non-technical discussion will in X steps derail into 'UBI-is-the-only-solution' ?
Maybe when the discussion is labor rights
For those living (and planning to stay) in areas with high wage standards (like most of the Western world!), keep in mind that remote work also opens your job to competition from much cheaper places.
Great for the people in those places, but your happiness to be able to skip the commute may quickly turn into a lot of unhappiness because you can't make a living wage anymore.
That's why we need something like a universal basic income to alleviate peoples' dependence on a job or wage. Outsourcing has already eliminated many peoples' jobs, that's a big reason why Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric got elected.
Universal basic income will make the issue the parent talks about more prominent, not less. If you live in a high wage area, and everyone gets same UBI, your life quality will not improve.
How many of us don't want to commute to the office 5 days a week, but also don't necessarily like the idea of working from home when not at the office?
My personal ideal is a dedicated office space in a location very close to my home, like in the nearest downtown, where I would pay a certain amount per month in return for a set of days on which I could reserve personal office space.
The issue with working from home for me is that I feel my personal life and work life become messy and entangled if I do too much work at home. Similar to how good sleep hygiene involves doing as few activities other than sleeping on your bed as possible, I feel for my mental wellbeing it's better to physically separate my work life and home life as much as possible.
If your work location is farther away than the nearest downtown you should look for either a new job or a new place to live imho. Commuting more than an hour a day is awful.
I live in a great town that's about an hour commute from the big city where I work. I would never make as much money as I do now (or find as engaging work) if I looked outside the city. I also have no interest in moving.
Granted I don't hate commuting. Since I take the bus I get a significant amount of reading done.
Definitely, I love to work out of coffee shops. Co-working spaces are another option (as a stingy person, I wish they were cheaper though).
It's great to change one's work environment every now and then. When I used to work in offices, many days I'd be sick of my office and want to work somewhere else, if only to change things up.
that's what coworking spaces are for. and it's absolutely a good option, if you can find one near your home. of course it may add to your cost, depending on how much space you have at home
Offices are hardly the problem areas to reopen - most of them can go remote.
It's the places that can't go remote that is the problem, and those are exactly the places where they need to be open many hours, in order for customers to be able to come.
The article has no research or statistics that try to prove why or how this would work and what the marginal difference is over a full workweek.
True. Apparently the author wrote a book about the topic, presumably that has some good citations, but one can only guess.
Applying the concept of hot racking on the offices sounds like a good way of embracing the "new normal"
Anybody else feeling like if we're young and healthy we should actively try to contract this thing, self-isolate for a few weeks, and be done with it?
It feels almost like this would be the most socially responsible thing to do: reduce the effective R0 and allow things to start getting back to normality.
I'm the farthest thing from a "reopen" protester. But I can't help thinking that as a young and healthy individual, this is a valid option that nobody is talking about.
NO. You risk spreading it, young and healthy people are still dying or having severe outcomes - we still don't know enough to predict how it will go.
And we still don't know if catching one strain once confers immunity, or for how long. So you won't be "done with it".
If you do get sick you become a burden on an overloaded healthcare system.
The people talking about this option are rightly being shut down.
To reiterate NO! Something that's not talked about enough is that the coronavirus is causing neurological issues[1]. The full effects aren't known, but examples of neurological diseases are MS, Parkinson's and cerebral palsy. That's not something to want to voluntarily get. oh, and that's not to mention that you're likely to get lung scarring or have a long-term cough[2]. The survivors will have major long-term complications.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2... [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-som...
+ Kidney issues.
Kidney failure could explain the swelling of feet, cardiac issues, and strokes being observed in Covid-19 infected cases.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v...
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/22/health/strokes-coronaviru...
And blood clotting, strokes in the 30-40 age set, including one youngish actor who had a leg amputated.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21244171/stroke-coronavirus-sym...
These effects are not specific to COVID and are common with severe ilnesses caused by viruses.
But what is the plan? We can't sit around for five years until there is a vaccine. By then we'll all have caught it anyway. Nevermind that food supply chain will have dried up way before then and nobody will have a job anymore. Even with my posh job at a big cloud provider, I can't imagine the public still caring about any new feature dev if this goes on more than a year, so bye bye "recession proof" job. I can't imagine many other jobs surviving much more than that. That is as much of a non plan as an unmitigated reopen.
I just don't think that works. I think we're going to have to end up making some hard choices about acceptable risk, and how we can use that to get to a better outcome.
>> But what is the plan?
There isn't one. Government has done little to nothing with the time they bought with our sacrifices. Mostly this is due to the fact there isn't a lot TO do - getting the hundreds of millions of tests that people want so some large percentage of the country can be tested daily is impossible anytime soon due to raw materials/resources.
Governments release plans to reopen that don't feature a single metric that holds them accountable, much less anything resembling open source / open data that drives their decisions. They bastardize the word "science" as something they are theoretically being guided by. The first tenets of science are transparency, open data, and falsifiability. No plan put forth by a state fits these criteria.
Anyone who points this out on Hacker News is downvoted massively, as you are undoubtedly noticing. As someone on Twitter very aptly put it, the Slack/Zoom/WFH class is more than happy to act sanctimonious about the whole thing while unemployment marches on to 20%.
EDIT:
>> making some hard choices about acceptable risk
People are bad at evaluating risk. Think about all the "Project Zero" slogans out there - no deaths from not wearing a seatbelt, no cancer deaths, no XYZ, no accepting risk of contracting COVID-19 until we get a perfect vaccine, etc. All completely unattainable. But if you point that out or try to have a conversation about it, someone swings down from the top rope with a story about how their grandma died of COVID-19 or that one young person somewhere died of it or had permanent scarring of their lungs (nevermind the statistics showing median age of death from COVID-19 being extremely high and the reproducibility of the lung damage being quite poor) and then you get massively booed and sometimes doxxed/reported to your employer.
It's politically untenable to talk about risk, hence a bunch of halfcocked "plans" of locking everyone in their houses to hide from the virus. We went from "don't overwhelm hospitals" to justifying layoffs/furloughs in hospitals nationwide by saying "oh you want to reopen? well volunteer your grandma to get it first" pretty quickly.
If people were good about evaluating risk, we wouldn't have the lottery fund education, for example.
We're fucked aren't we.
I'd never thought it all the way through until last night. But I don't see how we make it though this without something on par with the Great Depression.
Right now Microsoft and Amazon have this little bump due to WFH and stockpiling, giving tech workers reason for hope, but that'll start fading soon and they'll go down with everyone else.
It's the whole boiling frog parable really, isn't it.
Why do we think that in two years, we'll still have enough of a supply chain that vaccine development can continue unimpeded?* Some virus in China: no big deal it's China. * Some virus here: no big deal it'll blow over. * Lots of virus here: no big deal we'll WFH for a while. * "A while" is up and more virus: no big deal we'll keep WFH. * Unemployment is 6M/wk: no big deal look at AMZN/MSFT. * Pork processing plant shuts down: no big deal there's other food. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| This should scare the shit out of everyone still living.People talk about a V-shaped recovery, but I think we're very close to the tipping point. This depends on the existence of expendable pocket money for the public, an existing supply chain, and stable cash flow. All of this will be gone in about two months. If we're stuck with this for two years? There will be no product to buy, nobody to buy it, and no infrastructure to build it. Home values will drop, people will default, and the whole country from NY to SF to Dubuque will look like Detroit of 2008 or worse, cities and suburbs alike, but there won't be a "not-Detroit" of investors to come and fix things this time. Most of us who are young, intelligent tech workers living through a 13-year boom cycle have a hard time understanding this.
Not looking forward to this. The lone bright spot, China (assuming they're able to keep things in check) starts hiring the brightest from around the world, and that's how this empire ends.
The main difference here is that the Fed is refusing to fail. They have acquired more assets in 45 days than they did for the entirety of any single QE period. With nominal rates in the gutter and the appetite for US debt still high, the Fed will print, and print, and print. Asset class will get bailed out regularly.
People think this has a major negative impact on the national debt, and while it's somewhat concerning, it's really not that much of an issue as long as people want our debt that we denominate in our own currency.
The problem is that populism will continue grow unchecked as the asset classes are bailed out and their assets are propped up and backstopped by the Fed, while the common man gets a smaller and smaller share of the bailout funds. Politicians will quite rightly point this out and will use it as a lever in their campaigns. If it all sounds familiar... well, the man currently in office is an expert at that angle.
That doesn't mean we aren't fucked. I am merely saying that it's pretty unclear what the future holds, as evidenced by the stock market's precarious position.
The problem with that is, as far as I know, that:
- COVID puts even some of the young and healthy into the ICU
- there are reports of serious long term damage even in mild/asymptomatic cases, so you might be immune until the next big pandemic but your lungs may be busted forever
I doubt there are any report of "serious long term damage even in mild/asymptomatic cases". First, because we simply do not have any data on long term effects for the simple reason that this thing is less than six months old. As for lung damage is it mostly caused by ventilation, not by disease itself. I doubt you get artificial lung ventilation if you got an asymptomatic case.
Maybe it's possible that there could be a net positive from a coordinated and well-executed plan that follows this idea in an area with sufficient hospital resources to handle the small percentage of cases that end up severe. That said there are two reasons why this should not and will not happen:
1. Execution - it's not enough to tell the young and healthy "go get coughed on". Intentionally infecting a significant percentage of the population would almost certainly lead to an outbreak in the remaining population unless extreme care was taken. Keep in mind that a bunch of these young people won't have any symptoms at all- and we probably don't have the resources to test all these young people. The outcome would be too predictable- some young people would want to leave home after a week thinking they never got sick, and then would spread the disease to their community.
2. Politics and fairness - who are the ones most incentivized to be intentionally infected? Who are the ones most capable of declining this program and continuing to isolate at home for the next N months as needed?
Any politician who suggests this plan will be accused of sacrificing the poor and the blue collar, as they are the ones who can't just work remotely for the next year.
Personally, as a WFH-capable employee I would sit this out. Why should I go through this when I'm capable of effectively disappearing from society until the pandemic is over? I'm sure many other office workers agree.
Putting these two points together, this is neither something that we should encourage individuals to do of their own right (lest they fuck it up and hurt their community), nor something any politician would (probably) ever try to coordinate and execute at scale.
It's unclear to me whether you'll catch it again next year (like the seasonal flu), or how long your immunity will last. But if you want to go about this, I'd suggest doing so with medical supervision.
Consider volunteering for a "challenge vaccine trial": https://1daysooner.org/
Young and healthy doesn’t guarantee you’ll survive the disease intact.
The science is still out. We're not sure that specific individuals will develop an antibody response, though WHO will now go as far as to say "most" and "some level of protection"[0]. We're not sure being young and healthy is enough to guarantee that you won't die from it. We're not sure of the long-term effects of having caught it. Maybe it kills everyone 6 months later. Doubtful, but no one's been alive for 6 months after having caught it.
We still don't know enough about this thing, though we are learning more by the day.
As the magic 8 ball says: ask again tomorrow.
There is no guarantee that you won't die from the lighting strike. All the numbers show that risk for the young people is extremely low (though not zero), even lower than some other common ilnesses.
This has been my thinking for a few weeks now. Aside from bringing us significantly closer to herd immunity, it would increase the pool of eligible plasma donors for plasma antibody therapy.
And those are just the public health benefits. Saving millions of jobs and livelihoods is no small benefit either.
If only it were that simple. Coronavirus only induce a short lived immunity (40 weeks is the average). With the common cold varieties you basically catch the same virus over and over again as you don’t build up any long term immunity to them.
The end result of all this is you would get sick and then be at risk of getting sick again next year and the year after that all the while putting at risk anyone who is vulnerable.
There is really only one way out of this mess - a vaccine.
I don't think we have any data regarding immunity against this particular coronavirus. AFAIR, the nastier the virus, the longer immunity lasts, e.g. SARS, MERS immunity can last up to 3 years.
Yes we do (I have to dig out the reference), but it appears to be the same as other Coronaviruses.
You are right that the worse the infection the longer the immunity, but if we are looking at the young they have a mild disease so we should expect a short immune lifetime.
Edit. Have a look at Figure 3 of this pre-print[0]. This doesn’t encourage me that we can expect a long immune lifetime with SARS-CoV-2.
0. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v...
What if this is the new HIV/AIDS?
(I'm no fan of oversimplification, but this is what's at stake.)
This is far far worse than HIV, as in it is much much harder to avoid being inflected. The difference between the precautions for HIV and for this is night and day.
This made sense when it seemed like the flu- where you get it, and you die or you get better, end of story.
Sars-2 is you get it, and then you get some amount of permanent damage to your lungs and cardiovascular system.
Social distancing to stop the spread binary version:
Loop: 1) Work monday-friday 6 hours practise strict social distancing. Work remote if you can. 2) Weekend rest from social distancing see friends.
Its like a binary four square wave with on / off.
Reason: If we practice good social distancing the spread time of the Covid is five days.
So you are assuming people may get infected during the week end and won't be infectious the next week end?
"spread time"?
Ok, good point, there is just one small detail: the "without cutting salaries" part.
Employees will love it, that's for sure, but I don't think employers will get even. You are basically giving your employees a 25% raise on their hourly wage.
There are success stories of companies that pay their employees above market value, either by paying them the same amount for less work, paying them more, or giving them particularly good perks. It is the idea of quality over quantity: by giving out preferential treatment, you get the best employees, and keep them motivated, and their increased productivity will make up for the higher cost. But there are success stories going the other way too: cheap, borderline slave labor and a high turnover. Sometime a high volume of low quality work is effective.
But in most cases, the usual market value is what works best, that's why it is the market value.
I am not saying that working less is bad, but it is a bit unfair to have the employer shoulder all the costs. Maybe make it half/half: 10% less pay for 20% less work.
Measures like this could be packaged into preventative medical care, keeping employees healthy at the office keeps them out of the hospital.
Will there be objections from companies that have been part of the biggest stock rally in generations, large companies that took piles of the small business bail out money and, companies like Domino's that have thrived yet had to be forced to allow employees to wear even legally required masks?
If everyone started working fewer hours for the same pay you would be effectively devaluing the dollar. You wouldn't actually be adding more value to the economy.
Value in the economy is created by work and there is simply no substitute for that. Shortening the work week would simply make less value in the economy, making us all poorer and more idle.
Too much idleness I can tell you leads to stress, even more stress than too much work. 40 hours is not too much work.
To solve the problem in the article one could still cut the workforce by half that was present in the office simply by adding more work-from-home time for the workers which I find to be healthy my own experience anyway. our office is made similar overtures, saying when we go back to work lots of us. Be working from home as a way to tackle a space issue.
I'm pretty sure we're far away from too much idleness. 40 hours is too much work. 20 or so would be more than sufficient imho. That would give people time for hobbies and social interaction outside the office.
The Makeup of a Dollar [1] would be little affected by a change in working hours, because only the effects of labor are measured, not the actual duration of labor itself.
[1] https://satisologie.substack.com/p/the-makeup-of-a-dollar
You are making an unsound assumption that longer hours mean more economic output.
In some kinds of jobs this may be true, but in others-- especially ones with substantial intellectual or creative components-- it isn't.
In some cases studies have showed increased output from reduced working hours.
Many people outside of Silicon Valley have temporarily (in theory) had their salaries cut. 20% less work for 25-30% less pay sounds like it devalues employee time far more than it devalues the dollar.
Are people inside Silicon Valley not having their salaries cut?