New normal: Difference between revisions

Over that time employers have systematically dismantled many “peripheral benefits” of office life, treating them as regrettable externalities that should not avoidably accrue to their staff. That is, where they can be persuaded not to dispense with professional staff at all. The temptation to outsource meaningful work altogether to an itinerant, gig-working [[school-leaver from Bucharest]] is one that many [[middle manager]]s cannot resist.

So, things a junior clerk might have expected in 1990 — an office, status, privacy, a [[travel and entertainment]] budget, an assistant, an internal mail service, a typing pool, proofreaders — these fripperies have gone. The graduate clerk once had her own office — it might have been a coffin-sized, mouse-infested internal filing cupboard, but it was at least, marginally ''private''. Then she had to share it, then give it up it for a cubicle, then an un-barricaded desk in a row. Nowadays she has a soft commitment that, as long as at least the projected number of coworkers are sick or on holiday, there ''should'' be a spare terminal somewhere in the department she can log into, as long as she wipes it down and removes her belongings it in compliance with the [[clear desk policy]], before leaving for the day. Well — as long as she brings something to log in with, at any rate: even the [[IT department|hardware]] brought in to replace those erstwhile assistants has been taken away because it’s too expensive: now she must [[bring your own device|bring their own]]. Tea, coffee — even paper cups have disappeared from kitchens; chocolate biscuits have disappeared from meeting rooms which, themselves, are slowly vanishing as we compress our working spaces.

''The office has, long since, lost its appeal''. Like frogs in a warming pot, we have tolerated the piecemeal withdrawal of emoluments: thousands of cuts in a long-term doctrinaire erosion of paltry joys. But the professions changed over that period:  they were transformed into fungible, replaceable items of capital. In this way are ''personnel'' becoming ''plant''.

Now all this would be fine for work that really could be [[operationalise]]d: the history of technology, since the plough, has been the separation of work into simple mechanical tasks better done by a machine from complex ones that can only be done by the [[meatware]]. But, as we know, for professional work, that separation is far easier said than done. As long as it has not been done — [[Operationalisation|and it hasn’t]]<ref>The clue is that you still need people to do it. Work generally suitable for machines should be done by, well, machines, not [[school-leaver from Bucharest|itinerant school-leavers from Bucharest]].</ref> — you run significant [[tail risk]] pulling your punches with staff whose expertise you might really need without warning one day in the yanwning, unknowable future.