Under current settings working from home probably saves energy. Look at home aircon versus a petroleum fuelled commute and office aircon. A litre of petrol has about 10 kilowatt hours thermal energy. A 40 km each way commute at 5L/100km will use 4L per day or 40 kwh. No way the home aircon can use that much more energy than the office aircon.

That kind of cost comparison has to be reworked for heat energy vs electricity, summer and winter. However it means employers could pay home workers less as they'll need less income to survive. If working from home is clawed back I think it will be for other reasons like 'corporate culture'.

Taswegian

I think your obsessed. I am too. I’m obsessed with the Chinese scumbags that have driven the West into a decrepit corner we’re unlikely to escape from and into an unknown future more divisive of the haves and have knots.

Herein is the too well off Ross, obsessing over his real estate pile and the inconvenience of his world which includes all the good hardworking people on one side, and scummy street-dwellers on the other.

Obviously he has forgotten that living in little boxes all made out of ticky-tacky and all looking just the same, is a modern day reservation of the well off. Too well off!
He harbours secret longings to join a BLM protest march through the hordes of the homeless, who will dutifully move sideways, making room for the gated communities to inflict their snobbery on the real world, in a feel-good moment of conscience cleansing.

Over on this side of life where working from home doesn’t include an office under a boat, I face off with the enemy which is not as you might think, Mother Nature, but actually the government and it’s overbearing lacqueys’ determined to strip me of the ability to launch a boat by taking away my drivers license. Ageism not working from home is the burden of pain to most around me!

Dan

There is nothing "positive" about empty shops and streets, or any of the other results of politicians' stupid, totalitarian actions against the China virus. 99% of people never had anything but a slight 'wog', and the old people who died already had one foot in the grave. Old people are "valued" only when it suits the elites anyway, and they die from the harmless-to-everyone else flu in droves every year. I'm old, and I don't want slimy politicians' faux concern. They have never worried about me prior to the China virus; it's just the creeps flexing their power.

It is unbelievable that people working at home in their singlet and underpants are as efficient without an atmosphere of work activity provided by other people around them; that they put in a good day's work unsupervised. People are herd animals. They need other people. When I worked, going there and coming home on the bus with people you saw every day and expected to see, even if you never knew their names, but recognised them off the bus enough to nod to, was all part of the process. I liked it, even though I'm not a particularly sociable person. I shudder to think what enforced isolation does to others who actually like people. The lack of familiar people other than personal friends and families is what makes retirement hard for many people. So the idiot politicians whiz that off them when they should be out at work and hint that it will be the "new normal".

It is not "WE (who) are making things worse than they need to be…"; it is THEY, our now obvious (if you didn't know before) enemies: politicians and 'experts', who allow non-human (computer models) to do their thinking for them.

The lockdown-induced destruction of small business is a tragedy for mainstream Australia and the Australian way of life. In the meantime, government, the public service and bureaucracies grow bigger and more menacing to our freedoms.

We've already faced one summer of covid-19 and working from home. And massively adapted to working from home! Shopping online!

We do not owe the developers of shopping centres anything! Nor is there a case or going back into them as crammed in crowds with a dozen or so contagious super spreaders starting third and forth waves.

A second wave was a disaster, a third and a possible fourth? Catastrophe followed by a calamitous crisis of unparalleled proportions!

If we want to reopen we need to deploy what we now have, the reliable, 3 minute breath test. And we need to put/deploy it where folk can't drive, run or walk around, Airports, the turnstiles at sporting/entertainment venues, convenient bridges, etc.

We will need to live with this virus until there is a reliable, safe and effective vaccine and a 95% takeup rate. In the interim, not very much is going to change very soon!

In fact I see cities emptying out and folk looking for a tree/sea change!

And as a permanent feature of a smaller Australia! Now from where I sit, I see that as progress! And the sane return of the backyard!

Summers spent around and in the pool/a shade sail and under beach umbrellas. In fact you could employ the laptop just as easily from similar locations/situations! Nothing is ever going to be the same! Get used to it!
Alan B.

Dan. You don't need a licence to drive a tinnie powered by a 9 horse outboard. And you don't need a licence for a bike or adult trycicle. In fact, some of the E-bike variations can carry/transport a fair amount of gear. Trouble is, old mate. the most suitable and affordable versions, come from China. And we know how much you, sob, weep, hate them!
Alan B.

Yeah ........ can't wait for things to get back to pre-Covid normality and get back to the 9 - 5 routine in the office.

I'm sick and tired of working at home doing 6am - midnight 7 days a week to justify having to work from home!

I end up the loser working at home because I'm getting paid the same money for twice the hours.

That's just not fair! So come on everybody back to the office and start working half the hours you do when you're working at home.

Mr Opinion. If working from home means you need to put in double the hours to match your previous productive output?

It signals to me, that you are one of those unproductive incompetents, workplace bullies, who had most of your most productive output, done by others?

I said that this very outcome would happen when the leaners/the serially incompetent, were forced to cope without those they normally lean on and exploit! Suck it up bro and learn how to earn your own income with only your own intellectual acumen/abilities! Who knows, you might actually get good at it?

If not? Well, at least we'll be able to finally sort the wheat from the chaff!
Alan B.

Alan B.,

Actually I find I'm producing twice the amount of work when working at home.

I guess that's because I'm putting in twice the hours.

How would you explain it?

:-) Only joking, I know you have forgotten what work is. And isn't time for your afternoon nap at the retirement village?

What it all boils down is that frivolous industries have simply become just that, frivolous !

If this virus does actually kill off city centers, the inner city office towers, & the daily peak hour commute, what ever it's cost in deaths, it will have been worth it many times over.

The totally old world activity of going to the town center to work was a pretty good model in towns of 50,000, & perhaps even 100,000, where no one lived more than a few miles from that center. It developed when everyone could actually walk to work.

The fact that it continued to this day merely shows that the dumbest people on earth are town planners. Their damn fool fixation on city centers & push bikes has done more to destroy our well being than anything else yet devised.

What are we doing to ourselves?
Ross Elliott,
What do you mean 'WE' !

pseudo-individual,

Sorry to be one to tell you but WE = pseudo-individual.

Mr Opinion,
If you say so Kemosabe !

Musical Chairs!

Too many participants and too few chairs to begin with, but so long as the music went on they were all happy - now the music stopped and the author found himself without a chair.

This lost "capital" was never destructed, but just never existed in reality because tall office buildings in city-centres were never a good idea. So far the losers were the workers who were forced to commute there, wasting their precious time on earth unpaid, which is a form of exploitation - now instead, it is the share-holders who became the losers, shedding crocodile tears over losing their "riskless" investments. Why so happy to get nice profits but unwilling to accept that any investment is attached to risks as well?

Yes, superannuation too: nobody is forced to keep their super in risky investments - the choice is always there to keep one's savings in cash or safer assets, yet so many succumb to greed.

I don't like the virus, nobody does, but it did one or two good things and clearing up the city-centres and the unhealthy, stressful and unnatural lifestyle that goes with them, is one of them.

And good news for the few who liked to commute because they had no company otherwise: nothing stops you from taking a bus around in your free time even now, just without the pressure, to find acquaintances there (however, I believe that there are more efficient ways to find friends).

I agree with Hasbeen and enjoyed Individual's comment:

«What it all boils down is that frivolous industries have simply become just that, frivolous !»