Elon Musk says we should all get off our duffs and go back
to the office. People who want to work from home aren’t just “phoning it in”
from “some remote pseudo-office,” as he’s put it in the past.
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Now he says we’re immoral, too.
“The whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake
Marie Antoinette quote, ‘Let them eat cake,’” Musk told CNBC this week. Factory
workers, service workers, and construction workers can’t work from home, so why
do people in the “laptop classes” think they should be able to do so? “It’s not
just a productivity thing,” he said. “I think it’s morally wrong.”
A factory worker also can’t work from a private jet
A cynic might note that factory workers can’t work from
private jets, either, yet Musk’s commitment to worker equity didn’t prevent his
plane from making a reported 171 trips last year.
A cynic might also point out that a man who makes cars for a
living has a stake in the perpetuation of Americans driving to and from work
day after day.
But I’m not so cynical. Musk isn’t alone among corporate
executives in seeing employees’ reluctance to return to the office as a genuine
economic problem. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Bob Iger of Disney, Andy Jassy of
Amazon, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, and others have been pleading with or
arm-twisting workers to come back.
For many, the pandemic-era shift to remote work proved that all the schlepping was unnecessary. They can’t unsee all the wasted time, and questioning their morality isn’t going to change that.
Companies have tried carrots — redesigning offices — and
they’ve tried sticks, like reversing remote work policies at the same time they
announce huge layoffs. But in a tight labor market, the office has been a tough
sell.
The average office occupancy rate across 10 major cities has
plateaued at around 50 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported this week,
citing data from Kastle Systems. Remote work looks like it’s turning from a
pandemic necessity into a permanent feature of the US workplace.
Is this a big problem?
For some local economies, it could be shattering, but I’ll
get to that in a bit. First, let’s address why folks aren’t coming back — and
why they probably won’t unless we fix a big problem with office work that few
CEOs seem to mention: getting to and getting home from the
office.
Survey after survey bears this out. If we want people to go
to the office more often, we have to do something about a ritual of American
life that’s time-consuming, emotionally taxing, environmentally toxic and
expensive: the daily commute.
In 2019, the average one-way commute in the United States
hit a record of almost 28 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. Nearly 40
percent of Americans commuted a half-hour or more, one way, and almost 10
percent traveled for more than an hour one way.
For many, the pandemic-era shift to remote work proved that
all the schlepping was unnecessary. They can’t unsee all the wasted time, and
questioning their morality isn’t going to change that. They aren’t taking a
moral stance; they’re just making a rational calculation: They can get a lot
more done — in their work lives and in the rest of their lives — if they skip
the commute.
Hybrid workers are happiestWorkers are delighted by the switch. According to a survey
by the Conference Board, overall job satisfaction in 2022 was at just over 62
percent, a high not seen in decades, and people with hybrid jobs that allowed
them to work at home and at a job site were the happiest. A working paper
published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research even found that
the rise of remote work “lessens wage-growth pressures and (modestly) eases the
challenge facing monetary policymakers in their efforts to bring inflation down
without stalling the economy.”
What about workers’ productivity? Has working from home led
to a lot of slacking off?
Not obviously.
Another NBER working paper published last year found that
among workers at a large tech company, hybrid work arrangements did not
significantly affect workers’ productivity, even though people worked slightly
less on days they were at home and slightly more on days they were in the
office. Hybrid work improved job satisfaction measures and reduced attrition by
33 percent, especially among those with the longest commutes.
But if potential urban ruination is the danger, it isn’t a problem for CEOs to solve — at least, not by grumbling about their lazy workers. Rather, it’s a problem of infrastructure and policy; it’s a problem for local, state and national governments to address through long-range planning and a more realistic approach to urban development.
So, what’s the downside to remote work? It might be hurting
cities. Many of America’s largest and most prosperous urban areas rely on the
rhythms of the daily commute; the perpetual need for morning caffeine, sad desk
salads at lunch and beer gardens at happy hour buoy downtown and office-park
economies.
The shift to remote work abruptly disrupted this pattern,
setting off what has been called an “apocalypse” in the market for office real
estate and, for some cities, a “death spiral” for public transportation systems
— things that can contribute to a cycle that further damages economies. (I
embrace the soft pants revolution as much as the next person, but imagine
running a downtown mom-and-pop dry cleaners over the past three years.)
But if potential urban ruination is the danger, it isn’t a
problem for CEOs to solve — at least, not by grumbling about their lazy
workers. Rather, it’s a problem of infrastructure and policy; it’s a problem
for local, state and national governments to address through long-range planning
and a more realistic approach to urban development.
Like what? In theory, we know how to do this. If people are
sick of commuting to work, we could aim to make commuting much less of a
hassle. The ways to do that would likely involve some combination of reducing
the distance between people’s homes and offices, improving the modes of
transportation along these routes and reducing the other costs of coming in to
work, like providing more accessible and affordable child care.
If it sounds like I’m using the shift to remote work as an
opportunity to advocate lefty urbanist pipe dreams — better public transit!
fewer cars and more bikes! denser development! an improved social safety net! —
you’re right. I am.
But what are the alternatives? Digging tunnels for
underground freeways or a “hyperloop”? Self-driving taxis that ferry us around
so that we can work while we commute? Converting conference rooms to dank
sleeping pods so that people can just live at the office all the time?
Realistic or desirable?These are some of Musk’s ideas for the future of work and
life. Do they seem more realistic — or more desirable — than simply building
more livable cities and better ways for people to get to work? Or is all this
another way of saying, “Let them take robotaxis”?
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