Why Some People Still Won't Go Back To The Office (for Janet Daly)

The Upper Classes asked one of their personal secretaries, Janet Daly, to write an article making the Lower Orders look unreasonable and ungrateful for not wanting to return to their offices, or indeed, work in the jobs that, in 2019, the Lower Orders had been so grateful to their Lords and Masters for providing. These, with my comments, are some of her comments.

The minicab firm on which I have relied for years – one of the largest in north London – is now unable to provide me with rides home from evening events. Because I know them well, I asked them frankly what the problem was. The controller explained that they now had only four or five drivers who were prepared to work after 5.30pm, and even those, he said, were “very picky” about the jobs they would take.

Never attribute to sweeping social trends what can be explained by local economics. My guess is that there just isn't the demand later in the evenings that there used to be, and a chunk of that is passengers (drunks) nobody wants. It's not the driver's attitude, it's the lack of business after 5:30 in the evening. Her cab company won't say that, because they have already adjusted to the lower levels (than 2019) of demand.

This is not, I gather, an unusual problem and the scarcity is not confined to drivers. A good many shops and hospitality venues are now desperately seeking staff. Teenage school pupils have never found it so easy to get weekend work in places that would once have hired adults full-time. But there are apparently fewer and fewer adults who want full-time employment.

It's not just the eateries of north London. The Dutch are having the same problem. In what industries? "Most vacancies are in... retail, business services and healthcare" reports Dutchnews.nl. Strange, because the salaries and working conditions in those sectors are notoriously awful extremely good.

When you can't get a CEO for £4.5m a year, it's because you aren't prepared to pay the market price. When you can't get a Project Manager for £45,000 a year, it's because people have unrealistic expectations. When you can't get an office cleaner for minimum wage, it's because people don't want to work.

There are plenty of adults who want full-time employment. Just not at the chiselling low rates and poor conditions the employers had pushed them down to in 2019.

Something like 800,000 economic migrants to the UK went back home in spring / summer 2020. The Dutch are likely in a similar position. Add in a number of older people who retired or quit looking in 2020, and now can collect their State Pension, plus part-time workers who decided that, after all, the benefits of working were getting over-rated, and this is a long way to explaining shortages.

There is something very big at stake here. It is to do with the role that work plays in individual lives and in the wider society. There was a time when what you did for a living was about something more than simply the money you earned. It was one of the things that gave a sense of personal identity, purpose and context to your life. Children were asked what they “wanted to be” when they grew up because that was thought to be one of the key sources of a sense of self.

We'll grant the non-sequiter. A sense of self from a job comes from the skills and knowledge it requires and the community, if any, in which the job is worked. When employers do not train their staff, there is no sense of self to be had from the job. Nobody gets a sense of self from a zero-hours job. They get a sense of being exploited, or being a mug. Nobody gets a sense of self from being told there are no desks for them, will they please go home. Nobody gets a sense of self from being over-worked and under-paid. Nobody gets a sense of self from doing a job they could lose next week. Nobody gets a sense of self working for a supervisor who is a bully or a can't be trusted. Nobody gets a sense of self from being told how to think about other people. Nobody gets a sense of self from having to fake smiles and double-plus goodthink eight hours a day. That covers almost everyone with a job, except Daily Telegraph columnists.

“Going out to work” isn’t just an entry into grown-up responsibility and financial independence: it is the normal way for all those self-contained households to encounter one another in real face-to-face contact. Working from home is an attenuated version of this: a way of avoiding spontaneous, live connections, which you cannot control or anticipate, with people you do not necessarily know or understand.

Ah yes, "grown-up responsibility". A term that changes in meaning with every generation.

And "financial independence". That's a target that moves further and further away every decade.

But I digress. Let's get back to those "spontaneous, live connections, which you cannot control or anticipate, with people you do not necessarily know or understand".

My memory of daily work was seeing the same people, whom I knew and understood as well as I needed to for my daily purposes, at the same time every day, and having the same connections with them every day. We had face-to-face contact, but I think I would characterise it as stylised rather than "spontaneous (and) live".

For the life of me, I cannot see this attitude – which lays such stress on “wellbeing” – as healthy and liberating. It looks to me more like a fearful retreat from the great world of possibilities that lie beyond your own door: a world full of challenging unknowns and fresh perspectives, which might shake the comfortable assumptions that you can maintain so easily at home.

Working days for many people are a figure-eight, orbiting around the office for eight hours during the day, the bed for eight hours during the night, with a couple of hours between the two. Work is the same every day: it's designed like that. If there are "challenging unknowns" at work, someone did their job wrong. As for "fresh perspectives", these have to be sold to senior management or are useless. Anyone who works in a large company knows this. There are no possibilities on the 18:20 from Waterloo to Reading, and if you're not one of the first through the carriage doors, there are no seats either. There are no possibilities on the shopping run to Sainsburys, or in the hour in the gym. Everyone has their time allocated, and somewhere else to go already afterwards. There are no possibilities on a Friday night in Shoreditch either: just ask all the twenty-something men and women who arrived on their own, and went home on their own.

In Spring 2020, about half the working population were still leaving the house five days a week to go to work. And still are now. A lot of the younger laptop-jobbers rushed back into the office in Autumn 2020 and stayed there through 2021 because a) they were going bonkers working from home, b) they had some kind of reasonable workplace life, c) the workplaces were reasonable spaces.

Sometimes the cause is standing really still and keeping really quiet so you don't notice it.

The big organisations spent two decades squeezing more people into less space, and providing fewer chairs per person every time a department moved from one floor to another. Most large organisations do not have the office space for all the staff who have an address there, and the organisation has no intention of renting any more.

By 2019, work in large organisations had become miserable. Start with the 1.6 people / desk ratios of the open-plan office, move on to the cursory toilet-cleaning, the queues for the lift to get food for lunch, the ineffective air-conditioning that could not shift the smell of food from 11:30 to 14:30, the DIE training, the cramped offices, the packed trains and tubes, the lack of contact with one's manager from one end of the week to the next, the people around you forever on conference calls, the noise, and the noise-cancelling headphones needed to deal with it, and the endless bureaucratic nonsense from IT, HR and everyone else who never produced anything. Work conversations were held over e-mails, and office chatter went over IM. Nobody actually talked. Not even about work. And in a call centre, you are not supposed to be talking to your co-workers, you're supposed to be answering calls. In a processing office, such as issuing new passports or driving licenses, you're supposed to be processing, not talking. Places like that employ specially-picked supervisors who get blood from a stone by crushing it. Nobody in their right mind wants to go back to a 2019-style call-centre or a processing office. In a large organisation, people come a distant fourth after property, cleaning and personal computing equipment costs.

You see, Janet, the Upper Class do understand why some of their workers are not coming back.

What management gets is what it really wanted.

Management don't want the workers back in. They might have to spend money on buildings.



(Yep, I know. Right after I post something about keeping the nonsense out of my head, I do this. But it was such an egregious article.)