This was published 8 months ago
Opinion
If employers stop people working from home, one group will pay dearly
Sean Kelly
ColumnistRecently, I was watching Morning Wars – that show which, as critic Inkoo Kang explained, is so terrible it is mystifyingly good – when I found myself giggling at something unexpected. In the scene, an expert demonstrated to the hosts of a breakfast TV show how to wash their hands, for the time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice. It was set, of course, in early 2020.
Not so long ago, I would have found this unwatchable – as in fact some did when it was released in late 2021. I was repelled by anything that reminded me of that time. Now, though, I found I was not only watching but enjoying it, able to view it with bemused curiosity. Without me noticing, sufficient distance had opened up between me and those events.
Illustration by Jim PavlidisCredit:
Such distance can be helpful; it can offer perspective on a thing to which you were once too close to understand. But that perspective can also be troubling because that same distance can become too great: you can forget what things felt like, and begin to sense that those people who lived in the past were not quite real (even if those people were you).
One sign of this disturbing loss of memory: in recent months, the push among businesses against working from home has gained momentum. Several large companies have now linked office attendance to bonuses. Amazon has done the same with promotions. Meanwhile, business lobby groups have begun to publicly warn that with layoffs looming, people who favour working from home are more likely to lose their jobs.
The first bit of amnesia relates to where this started. It has become common to talk about flexible work as something for workers. And of course, it did help employees at the outset of the pandemic – it meant they kept their jobs.
But let’s be realistic. Businesses would not have spent the money they did on video-conferencing and the rest out of charity. The move against it feels, then, quite uncharitable: we were happy for you to do this when it was good for us, but now it’s good for you, we’re done.
Business lobby groups are warning that with layoffs looming, people who favour working from home are more likely to lose their jobs.Credit: iStock
Changes to the workplace often have this double edge. When devices with email came along, it felt freeing; but now, we can see it has allowed work to infiltrate our lives. It is important to remain alert to this pattern: in a society oriented towards work, work always seems to win.
Take the greater availability of childcare. It has allowed more women to continue working and did much to close the gender pay gap. We can celebrate all that while not losing sight of the fact it is also a huge victory for businesses, who now have access to more workers – and, as a crucial side effect, the universalisation of the idea that work is a thing we should all be striving to do all of the time.
In fact, we have internalised this idea to such an extent that those warnings from business groups – that you are more likely to be sacked if you work from home – can sound to us like commonsense statements of fact. But it is a clear choice that businesses are making. And having recognised that, we should recognise the largely unsaid second part of that choice: businesses are choosing to punish women. This should be a national scandal.
As a friend pointed out to me, this is particularly so given the recent prominence of Claudia Goldin – who this year won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Goldin has done much to explain the dramatic shifts in the female workforce over time. More recently, she has explained the pay gap that still exists. The New York Times has this summary: “Employers have begun paying disproportionately more for long, inflexible hours. Anyone who scales back for a time, or who is unavailable on weekends or evenings, is at a disadvantage.” Availability has become the key to success.
In other words, what those business lobby groups are describing is just the latest iteration of an attitude that has held back women for some time: that how effective you are at your job can be judged by how available you are. Women in heterosexual relationships still take on the bulk of domestic work. And because they often take on that work so that their partner can be more available, this stops women getting ahead. (Many Australians will recognise this phenomenon from Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought.)
For a brief moment, the increase in flexible work looked set to counter this, as men spent more time at home and women more time working: Goldin described it as a “silver lining” from the pandemic. But now some businesses are in effect saying: you can take the flexible option, but it will harm your career. This will largely penalise women – and because men, too, are facing less flexibility in their workplaces, even more of the domestic burden will fall back onto their female partners, which will make women less available still.
It is worth pausing for a moment to comprehend how remarkable this is. First, rather than building on the potential gains for women from the pandemic, some businesses are reducing them. But it is far worse than that: they are taking those gains and actively turning them against women, making them another barrier to success.
Here, it is not really the pandemic we are in danger of forgetting: that was a time when working from home could be awful. It is the brief, utopian period afterwards we must not lose sight of, when kids were back at school and flexible work was not yet penalised.
Perhaps we are still too close to see it clearly. But we should beware of the other danger, too – of getting too far from it, and beginning to believe that it was not quite real. It was, and we now have a choice about whether to make it permanent or forget it ever happened. We should not make that choice unthinkingly, and we should certainly not let a few business leaders do it for us, without a serious discussion of the inherent sexism of returning to the way things were.
Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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