Re: Remote Working News and Discussions
Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2021 4:28 pm
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(Politico) When F, a 37-year-old media strategist, started working at a tech company based in Austin in June 2019, she negotiated a hybrid schedule. She would work from home Tuesdays and Thursdays so that she could spend more time throughout the day with her 15-month-old son.
This was pre-Covid 19, and F was the only person on the marketing team at her 30-person company who chose to work from home a few days a week. With a child that young, her priorities were different than those of many of her colleagues, who preferred not just to work together all day but also to socialize together afterwards. “I’m not going to be in an office from 8:30 to 5, and then [go to] happy hours and drinking party boats,” said F, who asked for anonymity to speak openly about her former employer.
In hindsight there were red flags. Her colleagues told her they thought it was “fascinating” she had children, she recalled. “The thing haunting [me] was, they kept saying, ‘We really want an adult in the room,’” she said. That “adult” was supposed to be her.
After a few months, it was clear something was off. She’d come into the office on a Friday and find out about a new direction for the business that everyone else already knew about. When she asked why she hadn’t been told, they’d say, “‘If you were here, you would know,’” F said.
When everyone started working from home during the pandemic, she was relieved. If the whole company was remote, then she’d finally be on equal footing. But things somehow got worse. She was left off team emails or excluded from Slack messages. It felt like gaslighting, she said; there was a lot of “I could’ve sworn I sent that to you.” Then deadlines became unmanageable, she said, with requests for work to be completed by the next day coming in at around 4:00 p.m.
(Mano) So the pandemic is finally ending, and all of us are ready to return to the office—well, by “all of us” I mean white guys. And let’s face it, they’re the only ones who get a vote, right?
You see, recent surveys have shown that most corporate executives—still predominately white men—want to end all these touchy-feely flexible work schedules and this 21st-century telecommuting nonsense. They want to get back to their cushy offices where they can survey their kingdom of cubicle serfs and more effectively terrorize their employees. In fact, “executives are nearly three times more likely than non-executive employees to want to return to the office full-time.”
But the average Latino or Black office worker is not so thrilled at the idea, as studies show that the “desire for flexible work policies is strongest among employees of color.” There are several reasons for this, including the fact that ethnic minorities in corporate offices still face discrimination and suffer more stress than their white colleagues.
African Americans in particular are fans of telecommuting, because “remote work increases a feeling of belonging and makes it easier for Black employees to manage stress.” Perhaps this is why white employees are seven times more likely than Black employees to want a return to full-time office work.
I guess we don’t need to ask who put the white in white-collar.