The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
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Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#2The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t.
Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstreet traders? There would be a nation wide solidarity strike.
Bill Gates famously joked in the 90s that Microsoft would lose a third of their engineers instantly if they drug tested. The NSA even had to make an official exception on past drug use so people would stop failing the security screening (although they still get tested iirc).
Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#3The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstree…
Could it simply be data driven? Is there any truth that the jobs that drug test most often are or were more likely to have drug related incidents than the others? I don’t know the data but my guess would be it is based on past performance as a whole more than individual impact.
Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made
Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#4I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps salt in the wound, if you will.
Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.
Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#5I understand the problem, but it feels like this existed for a while and no business manager cared about it until they started losing the RTO battle. This seems like a way to boost that argument without actually caring for the employees.
Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#6The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstree…
Could it simply be data driven? Is there any truth that the jobs that drug test most often are or were more likely to have drug related incidents than the others? I don’t know the data but my guess would be it is based on past performance as a whole more than individual impact. Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made
If it were at all data driven everyone would test for alcohol. That usually doesn’t happen unless there’s an accident and even then, a doctor wouldn’t be subject to a blood test or breathalyzer like a driver would. They’d just be allowed to go home and the matter would be handled in litigation and before the medical board.
Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#7The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstree…
Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad. Half of silicon valley allegedly is micro-dosing all sorts of things and apparently benefiting from that. Steve Jobs famously advocated using LSD. The Vietnam war famously had a lot of drug abuse. WW II soldiers and leadership were consuming epic amounts of amphetamines. And that wasn't just the Nazis.
Companies aren't testing for this because they couldn't care less. Drugs isn't killing their business and they like having access to smart people who might fail a test. The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs. Also with drugs being illegal, using them necessarily means breaking the law and interacting with criminals. Which looks bad politically as well.
Remote work is different. People and companies disagree about the effects but a lot of companies seem to prefer having their people not work remotely. Not because of the way it looks but because of at least the perception of its impact on productivity. Whether you agree with that or not doesn't matter. Some people are concerned about it and acting accordingly.
The inequality here relates mainly to the value of the work people do. Just like companies don't like losing access to people who are smart and may use drugs, they also don't like losing access to people who have valuable skills that insist on working remotely. So they allow some people to work remotely. But of course some skills are more valuable than others so the inequality mainly relates to how easy it is to replace people with more compliant ones.
Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#8The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstree…
> The NSA even had to make an official exceptio
The way I had it explained to me in the 90s was while drug use was disqualifying for things like the FBI, for the NSA it was fine-ish provided you were open about it.
Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#9> remote-work opportunities are rare in jobs with annual pay around $30,000
Remote workers with lower salaries are usually contractors. Sometimes with multiple parallel gigs.
Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
#10I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps salt in the wound, if you will. Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.
I don't think those are the kinds of jobs that have workers that expect to work from home. If you deal with physical assets, machinery, direct-customer communication, etc, you probably don't expect to be able to do your job outside of your company-assigned post anyway.
On the other hand, anybody that works in a cubical and mostly deals with a phone/computer could probably easily expect that they would be able to work from home. Many of those jobs have fairly modest pay. And I think if you have that aspiration to work from home, you would probably still be a little annoyed about the inability to work from home, regardless of the pay. But I agree there is likely a price where one would be fine with letting that dream stay a dream.
I feel that the far greater problem is that employers are now painting this neat picture where it's employees vs employees in this dilemma over inequality. Foreshadowing that it may be something they need to bother to step in the middle of in the near future. When in reality we are fairly united against employers in their seeming lack of willingness to just treat all of their employees well. Speaking generally of course.