09-05-2020 Coronavirus is giving us a glimpse of the future of work – and it's a nightmare | Work-life balance | The Guardian

 
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Coronavirus is giving us a glimpse of the future

of work and it's a nightmare
Suzanne Moore

Women working at home are doing more childcare and

housework, while virtual work has no knocking off time. Will
this end along with the lockdown? Don’t bet on it
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Mon 4 May 2020 16.52 BST

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09-05-2020 Coronavirus is giving us a glimpse of the future of work – and it's a nightmare | Work-life balance | The Guardian

W
asn’t it charming when, in 2017, Prof Robert Kelly was giving an interview
to the BBC on the shifting relationship between North and South Korea,
and his marvellous daughter stomped in followed by his baby in a walker,
and then his stressed-out wife dragged the kids out of the way? We loved
the way he tried to keep his composure in the storm of domestic chaos. That glimpse of
home life: the serious man with his geopolitical analysis and the swagger of his little
girl who couldn’t care less … who didn’t relate to that?

In work mode, children don’t figure. And now that so many work from home, children
must be somehow removed. Women report that, when making Zoom calls, the sight of
a child will make them look unprofessional, whereas men fear this less because it
makes them look rounded and human. At a certain level of corporate success, this may
be so, but for most people the reality of work from home is fraught and muddled.

As the pandemic has made visible every inequality, it has also shone a light on the
domestic front. Women at home are doing more. More childcare. More home-
schooling. More domestic labour. Even if they are working. The old work-life balance,
never achieved in the first place, is now even more severely out of whack. Balance? It’s
walking a tightrope of competing needs. Virtual work has no knockoff time: email,
WhatsApp and the dreaded, supposedly upbeat, Zoom meetings mean workers are
available all the time.

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09-05-2020 Coronavirus is giving us a glimpse of the future of work – and it's a nightmare | Work-life balance | The Guardian

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This inflexibility is then somehow sold as flexibility, but it assumes the worker is
always primed for contact. The remote worker is, for some companies, the ideal
worker. They don’t need a desk or expensive office space. They don’t need a union.
They are malleable and compliant at a time when we are all concerned with the job
losses to come. They may not be quite as productive, but they are doing enough to
make many big companies think this is the future.

This future can sound bright. No more commuting. Everyone can go and live in the
countryside, which we have apparently all hankered for during lockdown. We quit the
city and can then afford home offices. How very free. Only none of it quite delivers.
Most people who talk this talk already have a spare room in their houses. Most of them
earn enough and most of them chose self-employment rather than having it foisted
upon them.

What we do need is to rethink how we work, and the answer cannot be an atomised
and depressed workforce.

People like to see each other. In real life. If anything, this situation reminded us that
there is something about human contact, even eye contact, that no tech can yet
produce. Spontaneity and laughter is missing from stilted digital events. Whenever you
ask folk about where they got their career breaks or great ideas, it is nearly always from
chance encounters; a snatched conversation on the way to lunch or being asked to step
in when someone else was too busy. But how are young people, who already can’t
afford city rents, to work in their cramped flats? When do they get the opportunity to
fly, to improvise, to step up to the plate in informal ways? Face-to-face interaction
matters. Serendipity is the mother of creation.

Certainly, the daft presenteeism and the ending of the standard nine-to-five – an
anachronism from the days of factory work – can go. And hopefully a lot of
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09-05-2020 Coronavirus is giving us a glimpse of the future of work – and it's a nightmare | Work-life balance | The Guardian

The social part is management shibboleths, which have been farcical for
what makes work decades, will recede, too. One is meetings of enormous
bearable for many. numbers of people. When I am king of the world, no
meeting will be longer than 10 minutes and, no, not
everyone will get to speak. We all know this is a false
democracy. In my entire career, the only long meeting I ever attended that needed
hours was a case conference to decide the future of a child in care, back when I was a
residential social worker. The rest have been displays of ego and territorial pissing. The
same goes for brainstorming, another redundant exercise. As Jon Ronson has pointed
out, brainstorming is just showtime for extroverts. Everyone else sits there waiting for
it to be over. Ideas happen when you are not forcing them. Who doesn’t know that?

As we come out of lockdown, a lot of workers will be asked to tolerate some very odd
conditions, and this will be done in the appalling business jargon of “resilience”,
“restructuring” and “change agents”. The workforce will be told this new way of
working promises flexibility – but enforced flexibility is not the same as choice, which
is what most want: purposeful work and some autonomy.

For too many, work is not purposeful, and lockdown has brought that home, literally –
but people need incomes. Those at the bottom of the heap on zero-hours contracts
already know that flexibility is a one-way street. Marx talked of four kinds of alienation
of labour, and the fourth is when the worker is alienated from other workers. Work is
simply an economic practice, and the social elements of production go unrecognised.
The great yearning you hear from many now working from home is just this – the social
aspect.

A post-Covid-19 future must not underestimate the importance of this to economic

recovery. The social part is what makes work bearable for many. For the lucky few,
work-life balance feels better than it ever was, but for many, I would wager, we are far
from that. Everything is work, and life feels baggy and shapeless. There is no break,
there is no off-switch, there is no childcare. Instead, we are meant to do it all – all the
time. If this is the future, no wonder so many women I know can’t wait to get back to
work – just so that they might actually have a moment to themselves.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist

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Work & careers / Women / Coronavirus outbreak / comment

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