New normal: Difference between revisions

{{a|work|

{{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]].

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.

''Do not adjust your mindset.''

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.  

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.  

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''.

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]].  

 

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?