WFH is such a middle class privilege ‘problem’

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Covid was a unique universal experience that impacted everyone differently.

For the middle classes with nice houses, working from home was heaven. Less time spent on commuting and more work life balance.

For some the lock down was that moment of Fate’s foot off their throat and they had the chance to ask deeper questions about their trajectory in life and made radical changes or quietly quit.

For Essential Service Workers they suddenly found their work was  ‘essential’ desperate being paid shit.

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For those children damaged in state care, they went ram raiding.

For many people they became insular and once homebound stayed that way.

If you had domestic abuse in your life, lockdown was terrifying.

If you were alone, many fell down internet rabbit holes.

Depression, anxiety, crippling loneliness – they have all had major impacts on all of our mental and physical well being.

I find the debate over working from home to be such a middle class privilege problem when so many others are still suffering.

It’s remarkable that tantrums over whether you have to go into the office or not is more pressing than all the other psychological, cultural and economic impacts of lockdown.

Labour won the war against Covid but lost the peace when they tried to build back.

Labour’s mistake was attempting to build back to where we had been rather than acknowledging the universal sacrifice and building back something better.

We all sacrificed equally in an unequal society and the bleeding gums of our inequality were exposed.

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13 COMMENTS

  1. But aren’t nice middle class people with nice middle-class jobs entitled to work from their nice middle-class homes? I mean it’s so much nicer. . . .

  2. Depends what you do for a living. Maybe that’s a definition of class. It used to be. Not possible for checkout operators, those building or fixing roads, houses and bridges, driving trucks and buses, shearing sheep, cleaning offices, collecting and processing rubbish, flipping burgers, waiting on tables, pulling pints, making plastic bottles in extrusion plants, driving forklifts in countless warehouses – the vast unwashed working class. And the middle class? What do they do for coin now? Oh yes, give them a laptop, hook them up to fast broadband and ask them to work off the kitchen table, a dedicated office if you’re really lucky. I guess they’d be doing much the same if stuck at the office. Doesnt sound like a middle class dream to me.

    • As Bomber often says there is a 1%, 9%, 90% ratio. 1% elite parasites, 9% crawlers and enablers and the rest.

      Middle class are working class too when it comes down to it because of their relationship to capital. Do you make your living primarily from exploiting the labour of others or by being exploited? Working Farmers and small businesses are working class also because most of them are in hock to finance capital–banks–via loans and mortgages.

      “middle class” is a socio economic group, and there are more complicated divisions of labour than in the 20th century when it was clearer what you were. There is contract work, interns, service work, precarious work, etc. And there is the aspirational mindset where working class people can identify with the capitalists and vote right.

  3. Depending on the type of work, it can be much more productive & you’ll have happier staff if the balance is right. However it can be career suicide if you never appear in the office, lose connections with your team and become invisible to those who make the decisions around raises & promotions.

  4. Objectively WFH is not really a working class problem–checkout operators, retail workers, carers, bus and logistics workers, cleaners, water and electrical contractors, meat workers etc. never really experienced WFH.

    But for those whose work primarily involves intellectual labour on digital devices rather than physical labour WFH is not a bad idea in some ways, as the numbers still doing it show. It is hilarious hearing Baldrick telling them off for being slackers and to do their patriotic duty and go and buy coffee and muffins.

    CoC cracking the whip is ironic in several respects…their sacking of thousands, and not just public sector–NGOs and contractors cop the flow on effect–has assisted the lack of customers as have tight economic conditions.

    Hospitality was crying all day every day throughout the lock downs, and are now at it again. Look, there is no guarantee in a capitalist society that anyone, individual, owner operator, SME will get an income or customers–a hard truth. Corporates are more likely to last, but…things can rapidly turn to crap for them too.

  5. ” Labour’s mistake was attempting to build back to where we had been rather than acknowledging the universal sacrifice and building back something better. ”

    When your party only represents and governs the privileged middle and managerial classes and ignores or refuses to act for the many people who are in your words paid shit.

    LINO is the middle classes ‘conscience vote that maintains their comfortable status quo while protecting their unregulated economic gains at the expense of the working poor who they throw a few crumbs to and make it look like they care about poverty and the unjust economic system they uphold.

    The union movement is a symptom of only being interested in protecting the middle-class economy and donating to LINO while believing they represent the left and the working poor even though many of them can’t afford a home to live in , in other words are not part of LINO and the union’s propertied class.

    ” We all sacrificed equally in an unequal society and the bleeding gums of our inequality were exposed. ”

    Yet LINO don’t acknowledge or talk about publicly this inequality or have a plan or is prepared to confront the fact that not only the middle-class vote when they have something worth voting for.

  6. It’s amazing how something that was imposed on us, WFH, has morphed into something akin to a human right.
    WFH was a privilege prior to COVID and rarely used by the masses…a 2-3 yrs later and it’s a ‘right’
    Because people got comfortable and used to it doesn’t mean they have a right to it.
    Should be each private companies decision as it is their employees.
    Govt Depts are not the same and subject to the Govt of the days decisions.

    • Willis is too old for Soper.
      Tolls are being imposed on us with Nationals new road build.
      Fuck you’re thick.

  7. Working from home, if one can, is so commonsense it’ll never catch on.
    One could also argue; if you can work from home then are you entirely necessary within the broader scope of things? I’d argue no because if one’s out of the way of the logical fallacy that is work place busyness then you’re contributing in a way even if you’re unconscious. If you’re an urban Kiwi then you can do something more useful than being at ‘work’ like wash your socks then dust the ornaments then put the cat out then try and find out who set fire to it. How’s paying that monstrous mortgage working out for you? There you go, that’s why you must work. You’re paying $3k a week for a house that’s worth about $700.00 in real money.
    Being a modern human within a neo-liberal greed-fetish society like ours is like being really, really high on really, really shit drugs.

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