Hacker News Reader

It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind

There's a lot more to it than that.

WFH has been a godsend for a millions of people who work full-time, but are also poor.

I drove for Uber for a while when I was between jobs. The majority of the people I carted around were people who thought Uber was a godsend because they were too poor to save for a car, and Uber allowed them to have a job that didn't involve manual or skilled labor they couldn't perform. People like call center operators, and medical coders (which is not the same thing as computer coding), and other jobs that aren't suitable for machines, and often done in a cube farm.

The pandemic sent all those people into WFH, and many of their companies found that the price of equipping their people with a laptop and headset was cheaper than paying rent on cubical space.

Now those working poor can put the expense of Uber into saving for a car, or buying clothes for their children, or any of the assorted other things that people need every day.

For millions of people, WFH is a helping hand out of poverty.

Don't forget it can obviate the need for extremely expensive child care. Someone working 9-5 in an office doing the work you describe needs at least 2 hours of day care with 4 hours being closer to the average. That's tens of thousands of dollars in day care costs a year.

Working from home means a parent can be home when their kids are home, available if they need to be picked up from school, and can just generally be more present for their kids. This is all especially helpful for single parents. They can't not work but day care costs keep the family destitute unless that parent makes very good money.

There are millions of people who work lower wage office jobs in call centers or other clerical jobs that benefited greatly from work from home. That's pretty populist.

You could argue its not populist but we can say its like 10% vs 1%.

That said, some COVID era stats showed 50% of working population doing at least 1 day remote.. and 50% is pretty much right in the middle of middle class and fairly populist-ish?

Something like 30%+ are still remote/hybrid today in 2023, so this isn't precisely an elite-only thing ..

> Before the pandemic, I already made a lot more money (as a lawyer) than my middle class neighbors. Now I also get to work from home three days a week, and get a lot more quality time with my kids, while they have to go to work every day because their jobs aren’t knowledge work.

With all due respect - so what? This seems like crab in a bucket mentality, just because some of us crabs managed to climb to the top of the bucket, we deserve to be pulled down because of some warped view of fairness? We should actually be trying to pull the rest of them out with us.

You’re not a crab, you’re the chef cooking the crabs. You might work for the restaurant owner, but your material interests aren’t aligned with those of the crabs.

The wages versus capital distinction overlooks the nature of modern businesses, where ownership is diffuse, and businesses are run by a vast class of skilled professionals. For example, Tim Cook owns just 0.02% of Apple stock, but he runs the company. Many executives below him have tremendous power. Individual engineers can have a major impact on the direction of the whole business. Most importantly, the executive roles are typically filled from that same class of people.

These people aren’t Steve Jobs in terms of their ownership interest in the company, but they’re not Apple Store workers either. Their self interest is fundamentally more aligned with those of the capitalists than with the interests of labor.

np- is acknowledging a difference between their job and the jobs of others. I think it's important to acknowledge those differences, especially since those other metaphorical crabs aren't getting out of the pot any time soon. For example, I think it would be nice if workers forced to commute had additional worker protections related to cost of transit/housing.

The similarities are skin-deep. Managers are typically capital-owners; employees are not. Capital owners get to dictate societal priorities in a way that others will simply never be able to.

Capital ownership is one distinction, but it’s not the only salient one. Other distinctions include, for example, whether your job generally benefits from communications technology and globalization. The private equity banker and the professionals that help them outsource factories to China share many common interests, and benefit from many of the same economic trends.

They may have some policy disagreements—but even those are often theoretical. How many professionals who favor universal healthcare are in the 45% of employed Americans who are “very satisfied” with their own health insurance? https://www.pacificresearch.org/americans-are-overwhelmingly.... But fundamentally, they benefit from the highly financialized, globalized economy. Their human capital mostly insulates them from labor competition, and they reap the benefits of cheap foreign products and cheap services provided by non-unionized workers.

I don’t think we should feel ashamed of being able to do our work from home.

There’s no benefit to making everyone go to the office/job just because some people cannot do their jobs without that.

I'd actually argue there's a benefit to those who need to work at the job site in having the others stay home: a commute in a crowded bus / subway where you can't breathe or spending 2 hours on a gridlocked highway is an absolute PITA for everybody concerned.

So if I can jockey my keyboard while sitting in my chair at home instead of taking the subway to do it while sitting in my employer's, that's a tiny bit more space for the guy who actually needs to go somewhere and work in person.

> that's a tiny bit more space for the guy who actually needs to go somewhere and work in person

For a little while. Until the bus company decides not enough people are riding anf the 1/15 minutes bus becomes the 1/hour bus :/

Agreed. And when even the moderately wealthy took public transit, they could apply political pressure to make it better. As riders get poorer on average, service gets worse.