Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man
I'd guess your employee who "disappeared" for a while while based at home might be as adept at not working whilst in the office.
"It seems there are a lot of entitled people around. They expect to be paid, but don't want to go to the office."
Let's dispose of the first bit; I'm long retired . I retired before working from home became a regular possibility. Some of that work was in laboratories so working at home would have been a non-starter. I have no direct interest in this.
But I spent a good deal of my working life commuting. I know the time wasted. The time I spent commuting from High Wycombe into London was equivalent to two full working days a week - for which I was NOT paid. I was not alone. I was in trains crowded - overcrowded - with others in the same uncomfortable predicament. Looking out the the windows I could see roads crowded with cars also taking commuters into work. It was a gross and unnecessary waste of huge portions of human lives and of physical resources. A society which has got itself into that situation needs to stop and think very hard about how to get out of it; it has a responsibility to itself and to the rest of humanity and the planet to do that.
I grew up in an industrial Pennine village when the mills were still working. Most people worked in the mills and there was a mill within walking distance of most people's homes, the exceptions being those living in the remoter farms who were probably not working in the mills in any case. It was a more humane way of life than commuting. Now we have the double whammy of the mills having almost entirely closed, so less work within walking distance and they have been treated as brownfield sites for housing so more people than previously now having to commute. It would have been quite feasible to have converted those mills to alternative forms of working. Put offices in them or whatever.
If companies want staff in offices disperse the offices into smaller units where people live. I return frequently to my daughter's experience - working for a company which is entirely based on remote working. It is feasible. We know from the experience of Covid that it is feasible for a good many jobs - not all but a good many. I repeat again, I have no personal sense of entitlement in this, just a sense from experience and observation that we have organised society very badly to have it depend on unnecessary commuting into huge conurbations to do work that could be dispersed. The entitled ones are those who demand that it be done this way.
