You would be hard-pressed to find a single positive side-effect of the pandemic. If there is one, it is the growing numbers of people who now work from home. Half of workers work from home for at least part of the week now, and many workplaces have thrived because of it. Zoom meetings save time and wasteful travel, employers are free to hire talent from anywhere in the country, and employees have escaped escalating property prices in London and steep commuting costs. Working from home (WFH) has been a boon for the climate, too; according to one US study, two to four days of remote working a week lowers carbon emissions by between 11% and 29%.
Yet WFH is now coming under accelerating attack. JP Morgan will now require employees to spend five days a week in the office and other big companies may soon follow suit. A perverse strain of rightwing thought opposes almost any social progress that improves other people’s lives. This Scrooge-like instinct yearns to make work as grindingly hard and low-paid as possible. Recall Jacob Rees-Mogg pacing civil service offices like the Child Catcher, leaving “sorry you were out when I visited” notes on employees’ desks in 2022. The same age-old sentiment prompted the CBI chair, Rupert Soames, to savage Labour’s flagship anti-gig economy employment rights bill on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, warning that the new bill would force businesses to let people go.
When Whatton in Nottinghamshire was severely flooded on Tuesday, villagers criticised the Environment Agency for removing its flood warning prematurely, leaving them unprepared. That may be so, but the Telegraph chose to convert an apparent failure into WFH warfare, claiming the agency’s flood resilience team in Nottingham “appears to have shifted to a working from home culture in recent years”. Evidence? “A job advert from last month said members of the team could ‘blend home working’ with time in the Nottingham Trentside office.” The agency bristled with indignation, and confirmed that the floods had nothing to do with anyone working from home. “Our people work in, out, on the ground, in depots, quaysides, fields and their homes, not just in offices,” it told me.
The anti-WFH message surged last year when Labour published its plan for working rights, which would make hybrid working a mandatory option for all employees unless the employer can prove it is unreasonable. The Mail called the plans a “WFH charter for idlers”; the Times asked whether it was “shirking from home” But Keir Starmer resisted, warning that a culture of presenteeism can be damaging to productivity. Even so, the anti-WFH narrative has proved irresistible to the Daily Mail, which has stoked the war on WFH with haranguing headlines such as “Working from home makes you lazy and lonely and benefits the middle classes at the expense of ordinary workers. So why is Labour pushing through a skiver’s charter?” Even the Mail’s own readers don’t seem to buy into this. When they were asked “Should employees who work from home receive less pay?”, they voted “No” by 61% to 39%.
WFH battle lines seemed, until recently, clearly drawn. Last year, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said it was “bizarre” that Rees-Mogg, one of his predecessors, had been “declaring war on people working from home” and praised the “real economic benefits” of Labour’s flexible working policies. So it came as a surprise when the heads of the civil service announced only one month later that Rees-Mogg’s rule was here to stay after all. Civil servants must now spend 60% of time in their offices. Unsurprisingly, civil service unions such as the First Division Association said the figure was “plucked from thin air”, evidence-free and one-size-fits-all, disregarding which jobs need face-to-face working. Why? Unions suspect intimidation by media attacks.
Public and Commercial Services Union workers at the Office for National Statistics voted for industrial action last April when they were ordered to spend 40% of the week in the office. Many staff had only taken jobs there after calculating where they could afford to live, with limited commuting: ONS’s Newport HQ hired someone from Carlisle who never expected to commute, the union told me. Many government offices have wisely never imposed Rees-Mogg’s 60% rule, and staff at the ONS are now in a silent standoff; they keep working from home, and still get paid. Last week, workers at the Land Registry voted to strike over the “arbitrary” imposition of returning to the office for 60% of the week, and are working to rule, refusing any extra tasks. Faced with the huge backlogs that are clogging up property sales, managers may be inclined to turn a blind eye to WFH.
Towards the end of last year, staff at the Metropolitan police voted overwhelmingly for the first time ever to take action against returning to the office 60% to 100% of the week. But the Met is acting tough, saying it will stop pay for any day spent working from home. The PCS union warns that such a lockout would trigger a full strike. But surely the government doesn’t want to escalate strife over something of minimal importance to employers, but critical to many of their staff’s lives?
Other public sector departments do things differently. About 9,000 female teachers in their 30s quit last year in England, citing a lack of flexible working. The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has said it’s vital teachers get flexible marking and planning time away from the classroom (many academy chains already offer this, without losing pupil contact time). Private sector employers are divided on the issue: Goldman Sachs ordered all of its staff back to the office, calling WFH an “aberration”, while Santander’s CEO has said he doesn’t think it “absolutely vital” that people spend all their time in the office. He’s still working from home for one or two days a week.
Much evidence suggests that WFH benefits employees and employers alike. A Gallup study last year found that flexible work drives employee “engagement”. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has found that about 4 million people have changed careers because of a lack of flexibility at work, and most job applicants think about flexible working when considering whether to take a new job – making hybrid working policies key to attracting talent. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, people value the ability to work from home two or three days a week about the same as they would an 8% pay rise.
The government needs to get a grip on its mixed messages. Does it want to be nice to employees, or nasty? It should ignore the Tories’ accusations that it is kowtowing to union paymasters, and emphasise how new employment rights will help civilise working life. Growth-boosting plans to get “economically inactive” people with disabilities or caring responsibilities into jobs will only succeed with maximum flexibility. And WFH, remember, is free, which makes it look like a very sensible policy in a year when large pay rises seem unlikely. It’s time to count effectiveness, not desk hours.