Last night on news, we were told that employers are begging people to come back to work in the office. Hopefully we have heard the last of the chuntering on about working from home being the "new normal".

The risks of working from home are quite massively outweighed by returning to a crowded office and shared facilities!

And where the corporate psychotics are robbed of their best ideas, and victims to blame when their very own irrational, original ideas, go pear-shaped!

And consequently, risk being exposed as the quite gross incompetents they really are!
Alan B.

The corporate psychotics/control freaks want their co-workers back as soon as possible, so they can get back to the business as usual borrowing and or claiming the ideas of others as their own, even as they reduce those whose ideas they have confiscated are reduced to tears by the bully boy abuse of these power junkies!

And risk being exposed for who and what they are, minus the cohort of their co-workers!

And may be chaffing on the bit to get the source of their best ideas and kudos, back in the office and performing?

So they won't be exposed!

That's the real and biggest risk!

As for mental health Good music that gets you swinging or singing along as you work, is good therapy and not something most would be comfortable with at the office!
Alan B.

If I go into the office I do Monday to Friday 40 hours a week.

Been working at home since end of March and been working 7 days a week sometimes to midnight. At home I'm doing a lot more hours at a lower pay rate.

Who's the winner: me or my employer? You do the math.

Hi A;lan,

Tokenism is a fascinating topic: in 1977 Rosabeth Moss Kanter published "Men and Women of the Corporation" and, from memory, she remarked that when a woman made a suggestion, she might be ignored as if she wasn't even present, then someone of a different gender would put forward the same idea and it would be hailed and lauded, with the copier gaining more rapid promotion.

Janis Yoder expanded on this:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2786708.pdf?casa_token=4M6ZWL-7t5cAAAAA:6IJAqlYlOp-oeoBPPRi2p6OSh8gD0JaARPDFXCWLfRZXw4WSuykUwGV1HuXG85M9hRo2wZafYmdHGsAOlcAnZEcfHgxcxhKzF8zH6NokSTJbZAjJ37Z08w

and this was followed by many interesting papers such as:

http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF02885753.pdf

I hope that some of these practices have been well and truly exposed over the last forty years or so.

Joe

LOUDmouth,

It's all just part of a planned corporate incentive program that is common practice in business and management circles.

Where does working from home leave productive industries ?

Productive industries will need to adapt. Or morph into co-ops where the work can be piece work and done by the worker cohort from a spare room or re-purposed garage. And supported by a couple of large delivery van or some such taking the pieces to various assembly/packaging points. And collected between midnight and dawn.

What'll make the latter work, is truly affordable energy! And fully electric delivery vehicles. Further assisted by a 15% flat tax we all pay above a generous threshold!

Worth considering in view that the virus is here to stay and we won't ever be able to go back to how things were until there is a vaccine and an 80%+ take-up rate!

We face an economy in meltdown and heading for a fiscal cliff!

And need to understand, now, today, finally, that the only private enterprise, free-market business models, that survived the Great Depression largely intact, were co-ops!

And that the Great Depression was a manageable recession, forced to become the Great Depression by suicidal conservative idiocy! Manifesting as dumber than dumb Austerity! In a vain attempt to preserve the status quo and privilege.

One has heard stories of millionaires reduced to their last million taking swan dives off very tall buildings, rather than face their reduced circumstances/less privileged lives.

As good as we were handling the dynamics of the pandemic. One sees in the unmistakable body language of the federal government. A diabolically dumb leaning toward supporting parasitical, exploitative foreign multinationals?

Rather than the great unwashed Australian cohort, i.e., we the people? The voters and employers of the elected serving officialdom!

Look at America where the leadership is too dumb to understand until you've beaten the bug, the economy is cactus and only looking good right now due to the huge debt creating, pump-priming taking place.

And where the stock market and reelection prospects far outweigh any and all health issues/the ever-mounting death toll!? Or that they are just too dumb to figure, without vibrant, general good health/herd immunity, there is no effective economy!
Alan B

Productive industries will need to adapt.
Alan B,
Consumers will need to adapt to new costings also !

Individual.

It's not the consumers who need to adapt, just the production and delivery model! Co-ops eliminate the usual bottleneck and the parasites who predate on the work ethic of others!

And if we eliminate all the unproductive practices from the supply side, we can more than undercut current costs.

Eliminate the paper shuffling profit demanding middleman/robber barons and you halve both the cost of doing business/cost of living!

It's the latter who want a return to business as usual and other folks earning their money for them and must be resisted to the enth as a new production paradigm is forced on us by the contagion!

Commissions need to be outlawed and replaced by salaried staff.

Production must be automated and wherever possible from a single covid-19 free bubble, per enterprise! I would suggest that is rural and regional Australia. Not jam-packed crowded cities!
Alan B.

I run my own online business where we were busy building the world's largest community of train travellers. Pre-pandemic we had a team made up largely of contractors as we're self funded located in a co-working space.

I have to say we've been hurt hard by two things - one the collaboration we used to have from other businesses in the space and two it's now very isolating working essentially solo. I'll be excited when we move to a back to work plan!

If you're interested check us out - https://trainreview.com