Talk:The future of office work: Difference between revisions
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Scanlon’s style is well-informed but also funny, off-beat, wry and ''millennial'': she is, says the grumpy old man, a lot wearier with the world than a twenty-five year-old influencer really has any call to be. | Scanlon’s style is well-informed but also funny, off-beat, wry and ''millennial'': she is, says the grumpy old man, a lot wearier with the world than a twenty-five year-old influencer really has any call to be. | ||
Being of Generation Z — just — it is no surprise Scanlon sides with her cohort, seeing as her own career to date has prescribed the idealised millennial life experience. But that makes her an outlier: few attain that degree of freedom and self-determination, so whatever you make of her material, she hardly represents the [[lived experience]] of even her immediate cohort: a narrow demographic of affluent, educated, young Metropolitan professionals. She is hardly well placed to speak for her wider generation, including kids in the poorer neighbourhoods of Kinshasa, Kyiv or Karachi. | |||
In any case Scanlon starts with some potted anthropology — in agrarian societies people worked during daylight hours, giving up their circadian rhythms only when forced to by the industrial revolution, and it took Henry Ford — not ''usually'' a Gen Z pin-up, but still — to recognise he would get more out of his workers by paying them more and asking of them less. | |||
So was born the nine-to-five, she says, and the western world has, arbitrarily, stuck with it ever since. But the nature of how we are — networked, digital, online — and what we do — we’ve pivoted from production of goods to delivery of services (“B2B SaaS”) — means [[this time it’s different|it’s different this time]]. | |||
Let’s take Scanlon’s history as read and park our questions — such as how “TikTok girl” would have found an agrarian day out in the fields, or who exactly it is who is meant to have stuck with the eight-hour work day, since it definitely hasn’t been financial services industry or their professional advisors<ref>The EU got so worked up about the long hours expected of workers that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to ''forty-eight'', and professionals have habitually opted out of even that ever since.</ref> — but let’s be clear: an eight-hour day in an air-conditioned office with a commute each side of it is ''no great trial''. It might be ''dull'', sure, but that is a different question, not addressed by where or for how long you are expected to do your job. | |||
Are there | Are there other reasons to think things have changed? Scanlon argues that, unlike production line jobs, services can be delivered remotely. This is presented as self-evident fact. | ||
{{Quote| | {{Quote| | ||
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I’ve done it all my life<br> | I’ve done it all my life<br> | ||
It makes the peas taste funny<br> | It makes the peas taste funny<br> | ||
But it keeps them on the knife}} | But it keeps them on the knife. | ||
:—''Anon''.}} | |||
In a limited sense it is true: in times of extraordinary necessity, we can, ''en masse'', deliver services remotely. [[COVID-19|Covid]] has proved it. But this is like saying we ''can'' eat peas with a knife. But is this the ''best'' way of delivering services? When staff sequester themselves in their box rooms and interact solely through the medium of Slack, Zoom and Teams, are they working at their best? | |||
Scanlon’s arguments begin to lose force as she goes on. Generation Z, she says, is special: | |||
{{quote| | |||
Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitised world.}} | |||
The problem is boomers like Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman expecting everyone to graft just like they did, as if hard work, and not ''smart'' work, is a religion. but seeing as Gen Zers have it worse than anyone else the payoff is no longer worth it. the only reason we even tolerate is that it is enforced by modernity, artificial constraints and, basically habit. | The problem is boomers like Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman expecting everyone to graft just like they did, as if hard work, and not ''smart'' work, is a religion. but seeing as Gen Zers have it worse than anyone else the payoff is no longer worth it. the only reason we even tolerate is that it is enforced by modernity, artificial constraints and, basically habit. |