The short easy answer would be that the 19th century work concepts and patterns have exhausted themselves in the 21st century.
However, a bit more extensive explanation might be in order, but lets not muck about it – it’s not the commute.
The general assumption that, starting with millennials, all consecutive generations are plain lazy and don’t want to put in the required amount of effort, is not cutting it. The truth is much simpler: the Ys, and next generational letters, simply openly voiced the 100 year old truth – employer is not one’s family and work is mostly an unpleasant necessity rather than a pleasure. Couple it with science of 20% of the CEOs being psychopaths , which projects down on the whole organisation, and one can easily understand why in the modern climate of individual rights, professional dissatisfaction is openly vented and opportunities to escape the cage are eagerly seized.
Pandemic empirically proved that employers can be creative when it comes to work patterns, assisted by advanced technology, so why are they surprised now at the workers’ reluctance to return to their corporate salt mines? The somewhat eccentric American anthropologist David Graeber extensively researched the sociology of work market and relations, which he summerised in his Bullshit Jobs masterpiece. His damning report clearly shows that the current employment eco-system is not only psychologically and mentally damaging employees but constitutes a tremendous waste of companies’ resources, because they pay for redundant functions (the Parkinson Law, anyone?). So it’s a lose-lose circle of inter-dependency which is hard to break.
Or is it? Another interesting outcome of the covid era is the rise of the side gigs – with people stuck at home, it was actually an employer/government subsidised experiment to break free of the corporate enslavement and independently monetise one’s talents. And it worked out marvelously for many. Zapier research found that about 40% of Americans had side hustles in 2022 and the number is likely to grow.
Add increased automation into the fray and one should get a pretty good idea why employers are having hard time herding the workers back into the glass skyscrapers – they tasted freedom and many are even able to live off it.
There is another socio-economic principle which has been thrown around as a theoretical – for the time being – possibility: the much feared UBI (universal basic income). Conspirators are tooting it as the ultimate means of government control and regulation of the population, almost a China-like horror dystopia. However, again, coming out of covid, which may be seen as a pilot case of the concept, it may not be so bad. Provided, of course, freedom of other, additional, trade is safeguarded.
In my view, countries will seriously start to consider it when AI is massively embedded in economies and large swaths of jobs are wiped out.
In light of all the disasters befalling our world in the last years (yes, wars and climate change included) and major advances in technology, it seems totally detached and unrealistic on the part of employers to demand return to the 09:00-17:00 mode of work. Despite the grassroots resistance, they cling to denial of the fundamental change of attitude, and are more preoccupied how to force employees back, instead of going with the tide and altering the organisational structure to accommodate new reality.
We are living in interesting times as the Chinese curse goes. We will see how it all pans out.
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