On Remote Work

The technological capacity for a great deal of professional work to be done remotely was present before COVID-19; it was the pandemic that merely catapulted virtual work into the forefront of public focus.  Not every job can be done remotely, such as onsite inspections or directly manual labor.  The scope of remote work is thus limited to jobs that truly can be performed from smartphones, tablets, or computers (phones and tablets are computers, but I mean in the conventional sense of laptops or desktops)—at home or in a desired third-party location.  As for objections to working at home when the job does genuinely allow for it, there are only so many reasons why an employer would staunchly demand for their workers to appear in person, especially when they themselves might hypocritically be prone to work remotely, without jeopardizing their safety in road travel or wasting potentially hours each day by driving or sitting in traffic.  None of them are rational.

One invalid reason is because remote work is not traditional: it is not something executives or managers were used to at the onset of their career.  Because it is unfamiliar to them or because they had to come to a specific physical location to work, they think it is pragmatically or morally necessary for other people to do the same, when technology often makes this unnecessary.  Another similar reason is because they think that company culture is threatened if workers are not congregated in one place.  This can entirely be a subcategory of the first reason, though it is worth addressing directly.  First of all, it is not logically impossible for a company culture to be preserved by digital communication, including a culture of kindness and helpfulness.  Second, company culture is objectively meaningless beyond a company not having a culture of stupidity (like forcing in-person work without need) or immorality.  Work is left to itself about labor for pay and not about what might frequently be nothing more than the facade of camaraderie.

Still another illogical reason to oppose remote work is because its objectors stupidly think that remote workers are inherently lazy.  This is a problem with workers on an individual basis and not with remote work itself.  Even so, irrationalistic leaders might think that if they cannot see employees, everyone will try to misuse this situation to get paid for doing absolutely nothing.  Nothing about this makes it true that remote work by nature stifles productivity.  This does not logically follow, with logic being all that dictates truth and falsity, possibility and impossibility, and relevance and irrelevance, as opposed to studies, feelings, and social norms.  An employer's wishes are objectively irrelevant.  In actuality, having more time to themself outside of working hours could easily mean an employee has more energy to immediately invest in their work and fewer obstacles to exerting consistent concentration.  The freedom to not commute can also lead them to regard their work more positively, since it is objectively no longer as much of an imposition on their life.

Thus, he or she can be more productive or psychologically devoted to their work, instead of spending time at an office recovering from having to wake up early to prepare to navigate through potentially crowded roadways in order to gratuitously arrive at work.  However, such logically necessary facts are not what employers tend to be concerned with.  Some, many indeed, simply like having the power to make other people's lives miserable or confined for no reason other than sheer subjectivist, egoistic whim.  They might think that if they suffered in the workplace, it must remain the same for future workers.  They could also merely crave their organizational power to make others comply with their whims or leave the company, personal financial standing be damned.  This is not even about the alleged need to directly observe workers to enforce efficiency or "make" them actually work.  It is about utterly asinine self-gratification.  In the context of the petty social construct of the workplace, this is expressed by exercising power to make the employer feel superior on invalid basis or to intimidate or "punish" employees into submission.

Because this entails enormous philosophical error at the very heart of their misplaced worldview, it is the most irrationalistic of these reasons why certain corporate figures oppose remote work.  The objective truths of logic are disregarded, and these people likely assume morality either does not exist or is in their own favor simply out of convenience, all of which is far more far-reaching than idiotic workplace observation habits or thoughtless love of tradition.  If an employer really cared about the time and safety of their workers, they would not force them to needlessly forfeit additional sleep to spend up to hours getting ready to risk their lives driving on a regular basis, nor would they "mandate" any mass scale office attendance that contributes to extensive environmental emissions.  Corporate talk about how companies are "family" is sheer bullshit in plenty of cases that is only used to distract workers from such things.