This post is sort of a follow-on from my previous post on whether or not work is bad. The basic conclusion of that post was that in one sense yes, work is unpleasant and there are good reasons to dislike it, but the need to work is sort of like the need to eat or sleep. Sometimes it really sucks, but it’s a reality of the universe that we are stuck with, and so the optimal coping strategy is to just make the best of it (exactly the same as with, say, your need to sleep—you aren’t going to get very far trying to eliminate sleep from your life completely, so you’re much better off building a healthy relationship with your sleep pattern).

This viewpoint refutes the r/antiwork people, who are basically communists/”work abolitionists.” Typical leftist tripe that is easily refuted around these parts. More importantly, it also refutes what I consider to be the right-leaning counterpart to that, the boomer “work til you die” mindset. This is the mindset you will see, most often though not exclusively among older conservatives, that work is much more than just a necessary evil in life—no, not only is work actively good for you, but your job is central to your identity as a human being, it’s a fundamental purpose of life itself. These people will often give off the impression that they think your career is at least as important as your devotion to your family or to God, if not even more so.

Among the younger generations, I sometimes wonder if this dichotomy is getting scrambled a bit (I certainly hope it is). I mean sure, you still have tons of young lefties who just don’t want to work, that’s always going to be there. But a lot of the white-collar professional class, the people you would typically think of as real career strivers, has gotten very liberal in recent generations, while on the other side of the aisle the “dissident right” has spent the recent past re-discovering the obvious truth that devotion to one’s family and to God matters far more in life than devotion to wokeshit megacorps that hate you.

This is one reason that the takeover of the Republican party by Elon Musk bothers me so much, because I see it as a reversal of this trend. Elon Musk wants you to work 80+ hours a week (he brags that DOGE works 120 hour weeks, in fact!) to make his green lines go up, and he doesn’t give a shit about you other than that. If you think something else in life matters besides making the line go up, well, he’s happy to import some H1Bs to replace you, as he made crystal-clear just a few months ago. I think this is why he’s laser-focused on just blowing up the federal government—he’s behaving like a libertarian who wants those pesky regulators out of the way of his companies.

Perhaps an understandable motivation from where he’s sitting in life, but very far away from my own concerns and interests. This is what people used to think of when they thought about the Republican/Democrat dichotomy—wealthy corporate executives who primarily want tax cuts on the one side, arrayed against the concerns of common laborers on the other. Wokeness began to scramble this dichotomy and then Trump took advantage of that and really threw it for a loop, which was for the better in my opinion. I generally side with laborers over corporate executives but against wokeness.

The way I see it, Musk seeks to hijack the latter in order to screw me over on the former. We don’t need another article about Elon Musk, though. Didn’t the title of this article mention telework? Let’s get to that already. Telework and remote work (for purposes of this article, the terms are interchangeable) has recently become salient in large part because of Musk and DOGE, who have instituted a strict and near-total ban on these things for all federal workers, the majority of whom had been teleworking in some capacity since COVID.

Rightoids have predictably cheered for this, because of course we must Hurt the Bad People. I have seen many people complain that if they don’t get to telework, why should feds get to? Indeed, it seems that the rise of Trump 2.0 and the administration’s obvious hostility towards telework has led to a knock-on “vibe shift” against the practice in the private sector as well, with many companies deciding that now is the time to declare their own RTO (return to office) mandates and ban telework for their workers as well. This goes back to something I’ve written previously regarding the mistreatment of federal workers—how the government treats its workers doesn’t stay contained to just the feds, it sends a signal out to society as a whole with attendant ripple effects.

So right now there is a cascade of confirmation bias on the right regarding telework. Banning telework hurts feds, so it must be good, so therefore telework must be bad. At no point in this process have I seen anyone really lay out any coherent case for how or why telework is so awful—instead, it’s just people going along with Trump’s baseless statements that remote workers are somehow off playing golf instead of working, or that the people in those jobs might have died without anyone noticing, or that remote workers might actually be working multiple jobs (okay that last one may actually be true, but hold that thought).

I’ve spent my whole “career,” if we want to call it that, doing nothing but white-collar work. Every job I have ever done has been an office job on a computer. I’ve been in-office fulltime, had a “hybrid” arrangement where I teleworked some days and went into the office others, and been remote fulltime as well. I’ve experienced all three. My viewpoint on this topic is that, unlike the reality of work in general, going into an office every day is absolutely not just a necessary evil that we all must put up with. If you can do your job from home, I am aware of no good reasons why you shouldn’t be doing it from home.

Let’s start with the most obvious claim, that people who work from home aren’t actually working. To some degree, this is of course true. Unless they are subject to some kind of extremely strict dystopian monitoring system, someone who works from home almost certainly will not spend literally every second from 9 to 5 working. They will probably take breaks to go to the bathroom and get snacks. They might pause to check social media every now and then. They may even go outside for a brief walk or check in on their kids (the horror!).

My counterpoint to this is that people who are sitting in an office are not working 100% of the time either. Again, unless a manager is literally standing over their shoulder all day long, they are also stopping work and doing whatever else based on their own personal whims. Office drones may get up and walk around, talk to their co-workers, pretend to go get a cup of coffee, take long trips to the bathroom, you name it. If someone actually has free time at work, forcing them to spend it in an office instead of at home will not somehow change that.

The time in my life when I did the most work, in terms of actual time and effort spent to get my tasks done every week, was actually on a job that was fully remote. This was because my supervisor at this position was a difficult person who busted my ass. I have likewise had positions that were either fulltime in-office or hybrid in which some days I did almost no work at all, because there was simply none to be done, or because managers couldn’t be bothered to find more for me at that point. In my estimation, the main thing that stops you from having downtime on your job is the people that manage you, not your physical location.

So there goes the notion that working in-office is “more productive.” I am always skeptical of any claims regarding “productivity” when it comes to white-collar work, as there are all sorts of issues one would quickly run into if one were to try and actually quantify “productivity” in a knowledge-based job role where much of the value provided is abstract in nature (as opposed to the tangible products created by a welder or what have you). Even if you were to look at a sample of companies and determine that, let’s say, those with anti-telework policies were more “productive” overall, teasing out causation from that correlation would be nigh impossible.

But of course, such epistemological rigor would take far more effort than opponents of telework are willing to expend, and so I have never seen such an evaluation even attempted, much less actually carried out in a convincing fashion. While the effort that my job required of me has not varied consistently with the degree of telework allowed, my general satisfaction with the job absolutely has. That remote job with the difficult manager who busted my ass? The fact that it was remote was the main reason I was willing to put up with the negative aspects of it.

It’s no secret that workers greatly prefer telework whenever the option is available, for obvious reasons of pure convenience. Going back to my own experience, I was very willing to work harder at a more difficult job in order to *not* have to deal with spending 9+ hours a day (including commute) in an office. Even when you don’t have much actual work to do, time spent sitting in an office bored out of your mind is still time wasted.

That is what the dispute over telework ultimately comes down to: Your time, and who owns it. Anti-telework employers want to own your time. In the boomer no-telework worldview, employment is a contract in which you sell your time to your employer. What you actually do with that time is of secondary concern. The employer demands that you be tied to a desk for X number of hours a day, even if you are doing absolutely nothing for some of those hours. Of course, many employers will go out of their way to find busywork for you to fill that time if they have to, but inherent in the word “busywork” is the fact that such “work” is of relatively little value.

I call this mindset the “time theory of labor value,” closely related to Marx’s infamous “labor theory of value,” and deeply flawed for similar reasons. Marx’s labor theory of value states that the value of an object or work output corresponds to the amount of labor required to produce it. We can instantly deduce that this is retarded and bears no resemblance to reality—if I spend 8 hours digging a hole in the ground, that is of no value to anyone, despite the fact that I spent an honest day’s labor producing it.

The time theory of labor value operates on a similar, and equally silly, principle—that the value of one’s work is inherent in the amount of time spent doing said work, or at least, the amount of time spent tied to an office chair and unable to do anything else. This leads to equally absurd conclusions such as the notion that someone who spends 80 hours a week to produce 50 widgets for their GoySlop MegaCorp is a more “productive” worker than someone who only works 40 hours a week but gets 100 widgets done in that time.

A much more sane worldview is to view employment as a contract for goods, services, expertise, etc.—you agree to provide your employer with access to X skills, services, products, whatever else, as outlined in your job description. Just like any other contract, in a sane world, each party would understand their duty to fulfill their formal obligations and nothing further. A rigid 8 hour a day (usually more like 10 if we include commute and associated hassles) blanket time requirement is an unnecessary complicating factor in this equation.

By behaving according to the time theory of labor value, an employer seeks to leverage more out of his employees than is specified in their job description. If this were not true, there would be no reason for the employer to behave in this fashion. What the employer does not want is for you to get your work done in 4 hours and then fuck off for the day. That makes them mad. They want you to spend 4 more hours tied down doing things for them, even if the things they find for you to do are petty, of little worth, and not part of your job description.

While it is obvious why this state of affairs is desirable for the employer, I think it should be equally obvious why an open-ended employment contract with an effectively infinite scope of responsibilities is not a fair or reasonable arrangement for employees. This basic conflict of time ownership is fundamentally little different from the struggle to limit the workday to 8 hours in centuries past. Employers should have to make their expectations clear and then stick to their word, just like anyone else involved in any other formal contract, as opposed to exploiting power asymmetries to squeeze employees past what they actually bargained for.

If it’s so obvious who sits on which side of the employer vs labor divide here, then why does it seem like the right has become so firmly opposed to telework? Aren’t we supposed to be the party of the working class now? Well, yes, but that skews heavily towards the blue-collar working class in particular. Age is also a significant factor here. I firmly believe that most workers who genuinely oppose telework, if they are among the laboring class themselves and not executives who view it as a threat to their precious line going up, feel as such because they themselves have never had the opportunity to work from home and perceive, correctly or not, that they never will.

These two groups of people—blue-collar workers (who also often didn’t attend college) and old people—have little to no familiarity with using computers in the workplace, and less familiarity than that with the concept of working from home. They abide by status quo bias, assuming that telework is bad with no further thought, because Tucker Carlson said on X that teleworkers are all lazy libtards. Their life experiences do not equip them with the ability to analyze the issue any further than that.

This is an unfortunate state of affairs, but thankfully a temporary one. We are still in the middle of transitioning between people that use computers and people that do not. The people in charge are all still people like Jamie Dimon, who we’ll get to in a minute. Jamie Dimon is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the US, and he is 69 years old. This means that when everyone was just starting to play around with America Online 25 years ago, he was already well into his 40s, meaning most of his worldview and assumptions about life had already calcified.

Millenials and “Gen X” represent something of an in-between generation of people, those who were young enough to use computers to some extent during the formative periods of their life, but who still had to navigate the world offline to a large degree. We are only just now beginning to usher in the first wave of adults—“Gen Z” or zoomers—who are true computer users, having had access to handheld computers (smartphones) en masse from the time that they were children. For most workers, COVID was the first time that they realized it might not only be possible to do their jobs fully remote, but highly desirable. So in that sense, we are really still quite early in the development of this issue.

The boomer-blue collar coalition may be able to put this cat back into the bag for now, to the detriment of everyone else, but it isn’t going to stay there. As more and more of the non-computer generations are replaced by zoomers and beyond, it is inevitable that telework will eventually become the norm in any industry where it is feasible. The boomers who currently stand opposed to the practice, shouting about how we didn’t have no stinkin’ telework back in their day (true, but we didn’t have computers or the Internet, either), are the same as a farmer in 1910 hearing about cars for the first time and dismissing them as a waste of time, staunchly maintaining that he and his ilk will continue carrying crops to market by horse and buggy, forever.

Indeed, if you are old enough to have been around when social media first began to spread in the early to mid 2000’s, you may be able to recall exactly the same dynamics playing out with regards to that development, as well. At first social media was used only by teenagers and a handful of youth, with the serious adults of the world sure that it was nothing more than a frivolous distraction for kids. Fast forward 20 years and we have an administration governing the United States that has taken power and shoved aside those stodgy old Very Serious Adults in the Room thanks in large part to social media and its effects on the information landscape.

Let’s go back to that fellow Jamie Dimon to close out here. As the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Dimon recently decreed that all his little banker drones must return to their offices in-person, full-time, five days a week, just like everyone who works for Elon Musk. Perhaps this is a big deal in the business world? I don’t really know, but the Internet algorithms have shown me multiple articles about it, probably because they picked up on my activities in the course of writing this post, so let’s see what brilliant reasoning Mr. Dimon is using to justify his decision. I mean, he’s the CEO of a really big important company, surely he’s super smart and capable and will set me straight when I hear him out… right?

Some selections from the linked article:

“Dimon argued that only corporate employees in middle management were hesitant, while essential workers never had the option to work remotely. "Where did you get your Amazon packages from? Your beef, your meat, your vodka? Where did you get the diapers from?" he asked, referencing the 60% of Americans who continued working on-site during the pandemic, including UPS and FedEx employees, manufacturers, hospital staff, sanitation workers, firefighters, and military personnel. "It's only these people in the middle who complain a lot about it," he said.”

So, he’s starting with the blue-collar spite-based mindset: “Some people don’t get to work from home, therefore no one should!” This is like saying that because some jobs only pay $30,000 a year, all jobs should pay that little. It’s the worst sort of envy-driven, zero-sum “thinking,” the sort of thing that you typically see from communists, who believe that become some people are poor, no one should be rich. You would think such a titan of capitalism would avoid this style of thought, but I suppose not when it suddenly serves his boomer sensibilities. Next:

“Dimon emphasized that face-to-face interactions play a crucial role in management and culture-building, which he believes virtual settings lack. He pointed out that in-person work allows for constant updates and dynamic exchanges of information, which are vital for company operations.”

This is the other primary excuse that I’ve seen for opposing remote work, and it’s the one where boomers most show that they’re simply behind the curve. If you were already well into your 40’s by the time AOL came along, I’m sure it’s true that you have never been able to get comfortable replacing “face-to-face interactions” with virtual ones. This is simply not the case for people who had a chance to use a computer before they graduated high school.

I can say with absolute confidence that whether my interactions with colleagues are in-person or over Microsoft Teams has made zero difference to how I carry out my work. After all, I’ve participated in countless communities and made some pretty decent friends purely over the Internet, usually in text-based formats where no one ever sees what anyone else looks like or hears their voice. Once you’ve had that experience as a teenager or young adult, communicating over Teams at work is not a big adjustment for you to make.

The reference to “culture-building” also makes me want to vomit. Fuck off with that garbage. No one wants to participate in the fakery of a “company culture,” we’re just here to do our jobs and get paid. This is another thing where I think there’s a big generational divide—younger generations will be more cynical about this sort of corpo-speak bullshit and less likely to be swayed by invocations of it. Last one:

“He also criticised distractions during virtual meetings, including excessive phone usage during Zoom calls, as a drawback of remote work. These factors, he argued, reinforce JPMorgan’s decision to require full-time office attendance.”

This is probably the worst one yet. As I’ve mentioned in Notes, meetings are the absolute bane of office work. They are, in my experience, 80-90% a waste of time. Listening to self-absorbed managers drivel on about nothing is easily the worst part of the job. The reality is that if I can be playing on my phone during a meeting, then whatever’s going on in the meeting isn’t very important, and my time would be better spent not tied down in a pointless hour-long meeting so I can focus on doing my actual work. If Mr. Dimon wants to end remote work so that we can all spend more time sitting in meetings, I think I’ll just let that statement speak for itself and rest my case there.

To sum up, instead of epically owning me with facts and logic, Jamie Dimon’s remarks confirm all of my assumptions about the nature of this issue and the pants-on-head-retarded way that boomers engage with it. This is pretty bad, because this is the guy that you would expect to be a hyper-competent leader that can really make a solid case against telework, if ever there would be anyone that could. Yet instead we see him playing into the same lazy, stupid platitudes that your uncle the plumber would probably trot out. Pathetic!

Why is Mr. Dimon’s viewpoint so incoherent and off-base? Well, maybe he’s stupid and/or consumed by boomer stubbornness, there could be some of that going on. I find it more likely that he’s dishonest, or at best, he’s deceived himself about his motivations. As an employer, he’s just trying to have his cake and eat it too. It’s not any more complicated than that.

Employees shouldn’t have to put up with such double-dealing, which is why I’ll take a moment here to shill for Walt Bismarck’s Tortuga Society. People who read this blog are probably familiar with this endeavor and its premise of stacking multiple work-from-home jobs. Obviously, not a thing that is possible in Jamie Dimon’s world! One selling point of the Tortuga Society is an opportunity for rightoids to re-align their mindset regarding remote work. Instead of assuming (falsely) that it is only for lazy libtards, Tortuga shows how highly motivated men can use remote work as a hustle to get ahead in life.

The second selling point of the Tortuga Society is that while stacking might be the ultimate goal, the skills needed to stack also obviously lend themselves to just having options in the job market in general. This is a game-changing situation for workers because it gives them the power to simply opt out of senseless RTO mandates. Boss decides Jamie Dimon is right? That’s cool, you can just quit, secure in the knowledge that you’ll have another remote job lined up in short order. This is really the only way for workers to build leverage while we wait out the boomers, so for the foreseeable future, it’s either this or just put up with whatever your boomer boss feels like doing to you.

Whether you agree with the Tortuga Society’s particulars or not, overall it is a step in the right direction for how right wingers should view their relationship with work and employment.