Boris Johnson - Working from home is part of the future Human jobs market, it helps cut climate missions too.

 

Some of us love working from home!

To a lot of people, the recent working from home (WFH) scenario as been something we have been saying we can do for years and wanted to - but, deaf ears would not listen, now we have proved it can be done as it has been forced on the workplace over the last year. 

Boris Johnson asking Civil Servants to go back to their desks as a gesture of reassurance isn't perhaps what they wanted to hear. Some of us have smelt the fresh air and we want it. 

Boris Johnson wants people to return to offices - one reason is to save the local businesses, but many of these are teetering on unviability and some have leases due to end, many of which will not be taken up again by the current tenants. 

Every day since 2016, 15 High Street shops a day closed their doors for good. Pushing people back into offices is not going to work, will not be popular and many will seek to move to working from home jobs if it is denied to them at present when barriers are lifted.

Boris may have a valid point in his gesture, but recent surveys suggest many people now want to work from home permanently. Why not just reduce the rates burden on small businesses to compensate for the loss of trade on the High Street? 

Greedy councils charging high parking charges, high rail fares, high fuel costs - why travel if you can avoid it? Surely this reduced travel is better for the environment a point that we are so frequently lectured about.

The lockdown has seen much of the day to day business go on-line and thrive. The genie is out of the bottle, people are going that way in preference to going out to shop. Why struggle into a town, pay a fortune to park, get a fine for overstaying and maybe not get what you want? Why not do it on-line, find what you want and use the time you have not wasted to enjoy yourself? Unless I know I can get what I want in my local town, I buy on-line.

This survey below shows most people want to continue the WFH scenario. Another one I saw showed over 33% wanted full time WFH, 19% to go back to the office 100% of the time and the rest adopt a hybrid model of home and work locations.

WFH works for me because I save more than £2000 a year not travelling to an office to do work I can do from home. I don't have to put up with people I would rather not have to associate with. I don't have to endure office politics, the stress and I get more done. So its a win win situation for me and the business.

I have reduced the stress involved in going to work greatly. All the time I was able to work 5 days a week from home in lockdown, I felt much better being at home, I can start earlier and finish earlier, I don't waste 70 minutes a day travelling to a place I can do without going to and frankly don't want to, just to do the majority of what I can at home. 

My quality of life is much better too. It is obvious where my future is - not in an office. I can look out on countryside and have cats around me as I work, real coffee, proper tea, why should I go into an office in a town to be with people who I have to tolerate, when I can do the same work at home with less stress and have no exposure to danger on the roads in my daily commute which I don't have to do?

It just works better all round for me. WFH is great. I want it. It is the future for me.

WFH has been coming - I have been saying for years it should be an option, in 2000 I did partly work from home saving me then 2 hours and 84 miles travelling per day. 

We have now replaced the commuter rush hour, we are using less resources to get to do a job - now a zoom call or just working on-line does it for many. Not every job can be done like this but many banks and other businesses are going this way. It saves them buildings only half full.

Why rush to a location where everyone else is rushing to get to a place of work all at the same time frame? This is outdated lunacy in an age when we can go into Space and walk on other Planets.

A salesman from a tool company I know said he is hardly travelling much now due to people changing how they want to do business - people want to do business by phone or on-line it seems. Air travel has been curtailed, in my view a lot of it was not necessary. 

Automation is now swallowing more human jobs than ever before

We are now reaching a point where I have been saying for some time that in the next 20 years, many jobs will have been taken over by robots. Since 2009, I have watched the job market decline, both in terms of quality and quantity of jobs. 

The demographic time bomb is also kicking in as we have fewer younger people coming into the workplace - the HGV drivers crisis has been coming for years. 5 generations since 1960 have been able to choose to have a family or not - now the deficit of fewer younger employees available to work is coming to be a reality. Robots will help bridge that gap by automating a lot of the boring things we don't have to.

We will need a Basic Income Guarantee System to pay people whose jobs and careers will have been lost to automation. Even niche jobs like Lawyers, Solicitors, Accountants will not be immune from automation. At the other end of the scale, low skilled work like fruit picking can be done more efficiently and cheaper by automation. Humans in the work place are becoming an endangered species. Boris Johnson - this is something you should be aware of. This isn't going away.

A lot of human work is basically quite futile, it can be done by machines better, faster and with less error. Why don't we free up our human society to live proper lives? 

We should use this work transition to enrich people's lives. Basic Income means that we can dump the useless, chaotic and draconian Universal Credit system too. We can streamline all benefits with a Basic Income program and cut out job centres, benefits offices and save millions here in this sector and the billions paid out in benefits system errors.

Our human future starts now, with the shift for some to home working, then as the robots take over more human jobs, we can enjoy a better life with a safety net of Basic Income. The money will go round so what is paid out will come back and it will benefit the High Street - with premises being taken for new ventures as the financial safety net is there. 

It just needs some vision and to look forward rather than at just the work from home deficit that is current thinking. 

Until we can unite all humans on this planet to adopt a plan where we all work together and live peacefully then we will achieve little from the possible open to us.

Covid 19 and the future of human work and the work from home situation

What is the future of human employment?

Do you enjoy home working, is this the new future for many?

And where do we go from here?

Covid 19 has in my view changed human employment markedly and may be ushering in a step-change in society that has been expected for sometime. In 2009 I worked for a company that was changing hands, prudently I checked the jobs market, I was ok in the end and was able to continue thus. 

Even then, I was surprised at how the job market had changed in the last 6 years since I had last been on the job market.

In 2016 a job ended and I spent sometime looking for work. What struck me was that the quality and quantity of work situations on offer had changed for the worse, markedly since 2009. 

The DWP was trying to get me to take zero hours crappy retail jobs, the problem was then that 20 retail shops a day were closing and there were far better qualified, newly unemployed retail workers on the jobs market with those skills. With Covid, many businesses that shut are not to reopen, which will have a big hit on those looking for work. We have too many 'niche' consumer actors that provide things we don't actually need, Covid is acting as the Grim Reaper in destroying many of these 'industries.' Fashion, Coffee shops etc. take your pick.

                                          Why the demise of the human worker?

Robotics and automation had taken many jobs since the 1950s, the new human normal is to get transferable skills you can take from job to job that is still true. Preferably skills that a computer can't currently do but you can, things with your hands for example. 

In 2016 I asked my MP about Basic Income - the reply was then 'that the government wasn't even considering it'. Step to 2019 and a civil servant 'was looking at it'. Suddenly, someone realised the potential impact of the non-human future of employment and how it would change.

The loss of jobs to machines tends to then create new jobs for humans, but this is now a scenario that is changing in this current industrial revolution. Humans are being bypassed this time, Robots are the future. We are at present just adjuncts of them or maintain them. How long before they achieve that situation where they do not need us?

                                                                  The Covid 19 factor

Working from home or being paid to just be at home by the state is the recent norm. I see this as being part of the human work future. Many now prefer home working and a form of 'Basic Income Payment' in the form of the furlough scheme was the only answer to unemployment because the risible benefit payment from Universal Credit would possibly have led to anarchy and public disorder ,when people had no money and no jobs.

For those thinking that the Universal Credit payment would be 'enough to tide them over' would have been in for a nasty shock had they had to endure it at the old level of payout. It is a very measly payment even with the bumped-up Covid 19 era increase. 

The quiet high street is impacting the real high street trade because the walk-in trade is gone and on-line retail is becoming king. I expected this to happen a while back. In 2016, 15 high street retail shops closed a day and this has largely not reduced. 

Back in 2016 I suggested that with employment falling, the state would have to pay a set Basic Income payment amount of say £14k a year to anyone over 16 and not dead, over a strata of say six status conditions - 16, Student, Employed, Unemployed, Pensioner and Disabled. You would transfer from one to another as required. Easy, no nasty DWP rules or sanctions. 

This payment would be regardless of being employed or not. The beauty of this is that people would still spend money and the high street would survive because people would be shopping if not working, that is spending in pubs, restaurants, other interests and hobbies areas etc.

So the state would quickly get their money back in a 'money-go-round' situation - in the main, this would have had many aded benefits, the care sector costs for example could have been curtailed because people could look after children and the infirm instead of work if they had a payment instead of jobs if those were lost. It would increase the economy and tax revenues to the government.

People would be less reliant on being wages slaves and be able to start their own ventures, with the benefit of a financial safety net. This was what I saw as stage 2 of human work development. Until this current situation of Covid, which has in some ways accelerated the change to the work environment this seemed a way off.

                                                             The Covid 19 work future

The new work normal is likely to be many working from home through choice - this has many benefits : it alleviates overcrowded commuting in high density areas, people may prefer home work, people may prefer not having to encounter stress or idiots at work, we have more time to do things because of less demands from needy people and we have time saved not commuting - maybe 2 plus hours a day to do things with for themselves, the public transport system is not overloaded. And we are calmer.

Plus the big one, you save money not travelling. And that's another bonus, the environment is better for us too -  not jetting off to Malaga and other places over Covid, there are more Bees, better air quality and quieter roads. Why fly quarter full airliners to the same place at the same time? Maybe 1 or 2 full ones a day rather than say 10 or 20 underused ones?

Brutally, why is it necessary for 100,000 people to go to a football match for 90 minutes of activity and then travel home? How much environmental damage does that do? I am not a Greeno tree hugger but I do believe in minimising our impact on this planet and this situation should make us rethink our future.

                                                                 What is the future?

Back in 2016 it was the same level as it is now. We move away from the current work or now historic work situation, to one where we use machines to 'do' for us. We build a society where humans get value from life and expand their own abilities, not slog away at meaningless work just to exist. And wonder at 65 'what was that al about?'

We need to build the sort of utopia that scientists were enthusing over 50 years ago, where machines work for us, we then have time for leisure and personal advancement  - otherwise what are we here for, what is our purpose? 

Just biological computers that consume the planet's resources, being enticed to buy things we don't need, run up needless credit card debt and ultimately die, presumably wondering if there is an afterlife and 'what the hell was that all about'?

Have we considered the lemming-like lunacy of racing into workplaces everyday, putting up with idiots we detest just to get money to pay for expensive houses and perhaps aspire to lifestyles beyond our means whilst racking up serious debt on credit cards? 

The future could be very good, we need to plan it and learn from the mistakes of the present.