Remote Work May Be Shifting Costs Onto Workers, But Workers Are Probably Still Winning On Net

Freddie deBoer is a great heterodox thinker, and you should totally subscribe to his (mostly-free) Substack.

Today, though, he’s got a take that I think demonstrates the limits of his ideological commitments as an avowed leftist and socialist.

While he’s correctly noting that remote work is shifting some costs onto workers — higher rents and installation costs for home offices, higher energy costs, etc. — as well as the seemingly dysfunctional outcome that some workers are accepting pay cuts for the dubious privilege of paying these costs, I don’t think that these outcomes represent the macro direction things are headed. They’re pitfalls, to be sure, but workers are only falling into them because they’re pitfalls along a path towards a future those workers ultimately view as (marginally) better.

Rather, it seems to me that remote work is inching us yet another step closer to the fabled leisure society theorized over a century ago amid the excitement of the Industrial Revolution.

Commentators like deBoer are primed to see and call out exploitation; and as far as I’m concerned, they’re doing The Lord’s Work there. But like any dutiful watchdog, their loyalty to their task often blinds them from seeing the big picture. Contrastingly, managers in most white collar industries are complaining right now about lagging productivity from their (mostly-remote) workers. And as usual, our political culture’s zero-sum mindset has already set these two narratives into a needlessly false binary. But we don’t need to naively take either 100% at their word to see that the truth is most likely an amalgam of what both sides are honestly relaying to us.

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Anyways, with all that throat-clearing out of the way, it seems that workers and employers are most likely engaging in a sort of tacit détente regarding productivity. Employers don’t want to concede that much knowledge work can be done remotely, and doesn’t require all the fantasies of face-to-face time for good collaboration to occur. Many probably also want to cling to the myth that all workers are equally eligible for meritorious promotion — it flatters educated professionals to imagine that they are hypercompetent snowflakes perfectly capable of working their way up the ladder, and it saves management from having to admit that real advancement requires playing politics. Letting the less-ambitious peons work remotely screens out the in-office population for whose who are willing to play management’s game.

On the worker side, most workers don’t want to admit that remote work reduces their productivity. They’re getting full-time benefits and social status, for less than full-time work. If that means a slight pay cut, they’re probably still realizing a higher real per-hour wage than they were working a full 40 hours in-office. And if that luxury means answering a few emails off-hours, it still may not be a bad trade-off to some workers.

Finally, let’s be real with ourselves: as theories like Bullshit Jobs outline, much of the time spent in the modern white-collar office environment wasn’t ever really productive anyways. It was spent at the water cooler, the coffee machine, in boring meetings, people taking a shit, or just browsing the internet. Before remote work, employers were subsidizing all of that by paying for offices and facilities.

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So, the new détente is a way for the entire culture of the white-collar industry to avoid having to upset any of its most treasured fictions. Admitting that much of white-collar work is ‘bullshit’ would mean sacrificing its massive wage premiums over blue-collar work — whether through a society-wide shaming, or outright taxation from the populist revolt that would inevitably accompany said shaming. Admitting that most advancement is not meritocratic but political would prompt an outright revolt from white-collar workers across the country. Admitting that most time spent on the job is not strictly productive would force on every employer the unenviable choice between adopting morale-crushing Amazon-warehouse-like levels of worker surveillance, or basically defanging their “time theft” policies. It would destroy the myth of the separation between part-time and full-time work upon which much of our regulatory state is still built.

The new détente lets everyone pretend they’re still doing most of the work they used to do, while living lives of leisure in the background. It’s a fiction built on a dozen other fictions, one which will eventually fall under its own contradictions, but likely not until the next major disruption several decades from now. For now, we’ll coast along, the white-collar labor market will find its new equilibrium, and the inequalities borne of this new fiction will fester, provoking a million screeching Vox thinkpieces while everyone else walks their dogs and waits for the housing crisis to get resolved.

In closing, socialists like deBoer would do their cause better to spend more time calling out these fundamental fictions. Lamenting these superficial cost shifts is small-ball, and misses the forest for the trees. Lenin would be ashamed.