About Working From Home. The current “debate” is going the way of most debates on social media, that is to say, crude polarisation, people falling on one “side” or the other, citing evidence they like and making sweeping generalisations based on their own limited experience. Here

are a few thoughts based on my experience of work over the past 35 years or so.
1) I’ll start with an obvious one: not all jobs can be done from home. Manufacturing, construction, medicine, social care, hospitality, law, police, maintenance, social services in the widest sense

2) Not everyone has an ideal home environment in which to work. To say the least. Young workers, especially, are likely to be living in shared housing, where they have their own bedroom but share limited living space. Working from home means working in their bedroom, where they

may have very limited space for an ergonomic, properly lit, heated & ventilated work space. Poor seating & lighting, long-term use of a laptop etc. can lead to chronic health problems. Offices are designed for this type of work; bedrooms are not.
3) Going to work isn’t just

about going to work. Especially in the early part of your working life it’s also about socialisation, meeting people, making friends, meeting future partners, socialising, seeing how companies work, learning how to behave in different situations.
4) Training: learning on the

job from more experienced colleagues. There’s much more to learning than formal courses and online modules, useful as those are.
5) Mental health and self-esteem. Working from home can be lonely and isolating; it doesn’t suit everyone‘s temperament, and even those it does suit

probably need to get out and meet people for their own good now and then. Work can also be an invaluable escape from domestic abuse, an unhappy home life and, in my own recent experience, a distraction from grief. That may not be what work is for, but that’s what it does.

6) People are more than just units of production. There’s something to be said for the argument that some employers will have less care for employees they rarely see and don’t know personally. They may see those people as more expendable when tough decisions need to be made.

7) Assuming people are happy to work from home, have good work spaces etc., who pays? Employers save on expensive offices and shops; employees have increased fuel bills, more wear and tear on their homes but reduced travel, food and clothing costs. What’s a fair balance?

8) It’s generally easier for us older workers who are much more likely to own our own homes, have established careers, savings in the bank, have raised their families, have as many friends as we think we want and are starting to think about cutting our working hours or retiring.

I have focused here mainly on the negative aspects, partly because I think the informal public discourse has tended to emphasise the benefits. Not surprising when you consider that there are many happy home workers prominent on social media and in the media generally. There has

latterly been a concerted effort by some in government, concerned with the wider economy - all the businesses that have built up to service the primary economy, to get people back into offices. Also the self-interested bleatings of people who own the commercial property -

@TiceRichard we see you, you Brexit-supporting, fascist enabling stain on society. But Covid19 has been a mass participation experiment in home working, which has proved that many people CAN work effectively from home for prolonged periods. Unfortunately it has coincided with a

government that doesn’t believe in society or in trying to manage this sort of change in a way that is fair to all parties, so we will probably see a free for all, with very uneven results in terms of the benefits accruing to employees and employers. Just saying...