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-{{a|devil|}}
+{{a|work|
-We hear a lot about what is and what isn't the new normal and how institutional employers night be pivoting back from the marvel of uniform remote working, to get them out if a covid jam, to a more stentorian insistence that employees, whom they have grown to distrust and even resent — to ''suffer'', as some kind of interim but necessary evil until they can configure the right [[chatbot]]s — need to come back in where they can by properly watched, audited, measured and periodically thinned.
+{{image|Battery hen|jpg|[[Legal eagle]]s in their eyrie, yesterday.}}}}In our [[Coronavirus|time of cholera]] we’ve heard much about what is, or isn’t, the “new normal” and how institutional employers might be “pivoting”  from the unexpected marvel of compulsory remote working they were bounced into by [[COVID]], back to their usual resting disposition of outright distrust, under which staff must present themselves on premises to be over-watched, [[internal audit|audited]], monitored, measured and assessed for [[Redundancies|periodic thinning]].
-This covid crisis is all very well, and we'll done, but really isn't it time we got ourselves back to the old normal?
+The institutional disposition has thus settled: ''calm the hell down, everyone''. We’ve ''got'' this. There’s nothing to see: this is ''not'' a new normal. ''Old'' normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
-But the new normal is exactly the thing for which HR dogmatists have been carelessly wishing for thirty years. Over that time they have exhausted all the value they could from ''their'' side of the bargain,  leaving their employees with none. In thirty years the status of the knowledge worker, as we are now called (it used to be a profession) has moved from professor to battery hen. This has been insidious, gradual erosion of the respect and affordances paid to professionals - office space, privacy, business cards, a car park, a discretionary travel and entertainment budget, secretarial assistance to manage it, even IT hardware (“bring your own device” anyone?). Almost all of this in the service of uniting cause: cost reduction.
+''Do not adjust your mindset.''
-In many ways “bring your own office premises” was no more than the logical next step, but in any case, covid has let the genie out of the bottle: just as we found byod a blessing in many ways (though some sybsidisa night have been nice) byoop offers us so much more: we can fit it our office to out own specification , have an oak paneled study if we fancy it, and no [[chief operating officer]] in the firm need care a row of buttons about it.
+But is not [[the new normal]] ''precisely'' the thing for which [[chief operating officer]]s the world over have been wishing, carelessly, for thirty years? Isn’t it the logical conclusion of a generation-long push, in the name of [[cost reduction]], to deprecate the office-working experience? For the “new normal” was here long before the bats went crazy in Wuhan. If you want to talk sagely about the “going back to the ''old'' normal”, well sorry, chump: that ship has long since sailed.
-Now we have seen that possibility, is it any wonder that the thought of spending hours a day commuting (at our own expense) back and forth into an office where we can expect to sit like battery hens at thin client telecreens and participate in exactly the same Skype video calls that we can do perfectly well from the comfort of our own book-lined dems, only with a larger screen, better coffee and and electric guitar handy for those lengthy spells where operations give their monthly budget update to the management opco
+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.<ref>That is, where they can be persuaded not to dispense with professional staff at all: the temptation to [[Outsourcing|outsource]] meaningful work altogether to itinerant, gig-working [[school-leavers from Bucharest]] is one that many [[middle manager]]s cannot resist.</ref>
+So, things a graduate 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.
+To be sure, that office might have been a coffin-sized, mouse-infested internal filing cupboard, but it was, marginally, ''private''. But, some time in the late ’90s, she had to share it, then give it up it for a cubicle, the give that up for an un-barricaded desk in a row.
+Nowadays, she has a soft commitment that, as long as the projected number of co-workers 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 before leaving for the day in compliance with the [[clear desk policy]], and as long as she [[bring your own device|brings something to log in ''with'']]: even the [[IT department|hardware]] has been taken away, now, because it’s too expensive.
+Forget about tea and coffee: what is this? ''Butlins''? Even paper cups have disappeared from kitchens; chocolate biscuits have disappeared from meeting rooms which, themselves, slowly vanished as our working spaces were systematically compressed.
+Long before COVID, that is to say, the office had lost most of its appeal.  Yet, 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]], interchangeable items of capital. In this way did ''personnel'' become ''plant''.
-The bargain is a two way street: I employ my intellectual capital in furtherance of your commercial aims: you afford me consideration —partly, but not entirely in the form of money — to do that.
+Now all this would be fair enough for work that really ''could'' be [[operationalise]]d. That’s the way it’s gone since the plough: separate dull mechanical tasks, better done by a machine, from interesting and valuable needing judgment and emotional intelligence, to be done by the [[meatware]].
-HR generalists are long on gasbagging about the lessons of behavioural psychology, but short on putting them into practice.
+“Bring your own premises” is just the logical next step. We already bring our own devices. Just as [[BYOD]] was an unexpected blessing, so is “[[BYOP]]”: we can roll back the years. ''Nineteen ninety is back''. We can trade a sterilised rectangle of desk-space for our own office, as grandiose or grubby as we like, with photos of departed pets, printouts of those faxed Larson cartoons and whale music on the Sonos if we want, and the [[Chief Operating Officer]] need not care a row of buttons, and can’t do a thing about it, even if he does.
+And now we have seen that possibility — not just seen it, but demonstrated over a sustained period that we can make it work: we are more productive that way, is it any wonder that slogging each day into a drab warehouse to sit at a telescreen, only participate in exactly the same Zoom calls we’ve been doing from home, only with crappier coffee and no guitar for those lengthy spells on mute — really doesn’t appeal?
+{{sa}}
+*[[Bring your own premises]]
+*[[Coronavirus]]
+*[[Operationalisation]]
+{{ref}}