Remote Work Rollbacks Highlight Need to Fight for a Shorter Workweek for All Workers and Families

Whether or not you work at a job that is possible to do remotely, acts increasingly being perpetrated by the greedy who own for a living to roll back the ability of workers who can work remotely to do so show in crystal clear terms that rich people think they own the rest of humanity. They think the rest of humanity are their slaves who they own as indentured servants.

I don’t think that it’s hard to see why it is that people who are able to work remotely so commonly prize it as an essential part of their working life – and it is not that they are lazy, as the rich portray. It is that, over the decades, the privileged classes have been stealing family life from the typical American family by extending the workweek a family needs to be in the middle class. Remote work has allowed for a small, but real amelioration of that. For those employees who work at jobs for which remote work is possible, the ability to work remotely took back some, just some, of that time. And this was not by reducing the hours worked for the employers, but by saving time that would be spent preparing for work, commuting to and back from and de-preparing after work. That is time that then became available for family life, household tasks and simply relaxing.

More than that, the possibility of remote work has allowed many people to realize what preparing for and commuting to and from work is – unpaid work, hours of unpaid work a day.

But when remote workers, who can very reasonably point out that remote work is actually more efficient in many ways, are puzzled that employers want to deny them family and personal time that does not take away from working time, they are missing the point of just how malicious rich people so often are. I think it is clear that the reason why the greedy rich people want to treat remote work as an amenity to workers is a crass lust to have control of working people, physically. When a worker is in a physical workplace, the employer gets to control where the worker has to physically be during the whole course of the day, what the employee wears, how they are groomed, when they’re allowed to take breaks, including, often, when they’re allowed to go to the bathroom and even when they are sick enough to be home sick. It is not enough for the rich that working people actually do the work they are paid to do. The greedy ruling class likes the idea that they have ownership over other human beings so they can elevated into feudal lords above all of the rest of us.

That is why, what I think that what the greedy rich are afraid of about remote work is a reality in which all working people, regardless of whether they work remotely, see they need not be physically owned during working hours just because they have to trade their labor for the ability to provide for their families. The rich want everyday people to keep feeling disempowered. Right now, many working people, sadly, feel so disempowered that it has actually become a thing for workers to “rebel” against their employers simply by refusing to work longer or harder than they are paid to work. But working people can stand up for themselves and each other far more – and the rich know it.

That is why I would like to offer that the response that everyday people should shout back at the greeditarian, own-for-living, wealthy class trying to keep stealing from them is to bring front and center something that we should have been talking about all along – lowering the length of the work week for everyone.

Let’s talk about the problem.

Rich people been stealing time from working people on a number of fronts. One of the ways is by paying workers in salaries rather than wages. In salaried jobs, employers can get away with forcing people to work more hours without having to pay them overtime for more than 40 hours of work per week. Ensuring that workers get overtime for working more than a full, legal workweek is, in fact, the very thing that gives real effect to the legal limit on the length of the workweek. So letting employers getting away with going around it by paying in salaries is abuse.

It is an abuse that just, plain needs to stop. And the best way of doing that is to insist that our politicians enact a very strict set of guidelines that prevent employers from counting workers as overtime-exempt salary employees unless the workers’ pay is very, very high. Do not be fooled into thinking that it you are more of a professional just because you are a salaried employee, because what it really means is that your time becomes a blank check for your employer to take from you at will. Being a wage employee means that you get overtime if they work you longer than the legal workweek.

Of course, the largest way that the rich have been stealing time from everyday people has been the increasing amount to paid work time it takes a family to be in the middle class.

It was an unequivocal good thing that, over the past decades, women increasingly gained the empowerment of having careers and paychecks of their own in the paid workforce. But, while that great advance was being made by women, the rich were cynically stealing from them and their families by doubling the amount of paid hours the rich extracted from everyday families for the privilege of being able to keep their heads above water in the middle class.

Over those decades, pay for women working more paid hours has essentially been offset by decreases in pay for men, resulting, depending on how you choose to calculate inflation and household costs, with very little increase or an actual decrease in the income of the typical American family. Thus, a middle class family, over the past few decades, may work twice as many hours as in earlier decades for the same or less income.

And, where did the value of that 40-plus hours taken from everyday people’s family life and relaxation go? Profits for the rich. The cost, endured by women, men and families has been less free time, more stress and more hours of people lives controlled by the rich people who own and control their places of employment.

We can see the solution to this problem by looking at what should have happened these past few decades.

What should have been taking place is that, as women’s paid workforce participation increased, the length of the work week for all workers should have been shrinking. Since what used to be a middle class income has been essentially split between two market pay earners, then, in all fairness, what should have also happened is that the number of hours worked by each worker should have been divided in half, too. So, by now, the work week should be 20 hours a week.

But even that drop in the workweek is not enough. We should be very clear that winning a 20 hour workweek, now, would not to drop the number of hours a family spends in paid employment, in historical terms. Lowering the work week to 20 hours a week would only take back the 40 hour work week that has been stolen from American families by rich people.

By first decades of the 20th century, there had been a succession of victories in dropping the length of the work week down to what it is, on paper, now – 40 hours a week. But the last such victory was in 1940, around 85 years ago. As I said, over the course of that time, the people who own for a living have been chipping away at it and succeeding in taking that time back from people and families to pad their own avaricious profits. It is now long since time that we stand together as working people to push back against the forces of greed and in favor of some of the profits that they’ve been extracting from us, instead go into the simple benefit of more family and personal free time.

The reason why the work week should have been shrinking all along is it the amount of productivity in our economy, the output per worker, has been going up.

As UAW President Shawn Fain told Congress,

Since the industrial revolution, we’ve seen productivity in our society skyrocket. With the advance of technology, one worker is now doing what twelve workers used to do. More profit is being squeezed out of every hour, every minute, and every second.

There was a time when this phenomenon was supposed to lead to workers getting their time back — getting some of their lives back. Nearly a hundred years ago, economist John Maynard Keynes spoke of the future of workers’ time. His worry was that, with all the gains in productivity, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. He predicted a fifteen-hour workweek.

Over the better part of the last century, instead being turned into shorter workweeks for everyday people, that spectacular increase in productivity has been diverted into more production that adds to the profit margins of the greedy rich. The rich become and stay rich by taking a cut on the production from everyday people’s labor in the monetized economy – that is what profits are. The rich don’t get a cut, and thus don’t profit, from your free time. They don’t get a cut of the time you spend with your children. They don’t get a cut of the time that you’re sleeping. They don’t get a cut of the time that you are just doing whatever you choose that isn’t paid employment. They only get a cut when there is more production taking place, sold and purchased for money.

That is why, probably more than anything, the rich don’t want to allow the length of the workweek to go down. They will fight tooth and nail to stop the workweek from shortening increase family and free time for everyday people. But, for the good of everyday people – for the good of our families – it is a fight worth having, and worth winning!

It is ironic – the biggest reason why the privileged rich are attacking remote work is quite simply about time, specifically about the control of our time. It is about the wealthy ownership class wanting to force their employees to expend unpaid time, that must inherently come at the expense of family and personal time, so they have greater power to treat working people like their serfs. And the wealthy rich people may not like to hear it set out loud, but their own malicious avarice right now is bringing front and center, or should be, the topic of shrinking the length of the work week for all working people.

Time to have this fight again!