There is another way of working, and it makes more sense
Echoing growing calls for a “live with it” approach to Covid-19, New York and San Francisco’s mayors, Eric Adams and London Breed respectively, are calling on the companies based in the downtown areas of their cities to demand that employees return to their offices and help restore economic activity.
It will come as no surprise that city authorities want a return to normality in their business centers and financial districts, but workers in the United States who in many cases have spent the last two years working mainly from home are unlikely to see the advantages of being stuck in traffic jams and packed subways morning and afternoon.
For generations, we have seen our approach to work as the norm, as reasonable, but the reality is that it is anything but. Corralling people into offices to which they must make a pilgrimage every morning and then a return trip home in the afternoon to carry out tasks that, in reality, they can do, as we have seen for more than two years, from any other place, can no longer be justified. To argue that the reason for returning to this “normality” is to help shops, restaurants, cafeterias, laundries or businesses that used to live off these workers is more than open to question, given that the basis of the reasoning is flawed.
