dublinpilot wrote:
I can foresee some choosing not to be vaccinated, as that requires their employers to make the workplace safe for this without discriminating against them, and the most obvious way would be to let them continue working from home. So if you want to force your employer to let you work from home in the future, you might choose not to get vaccinated!
I would go further and say that is guaranteed to happen, even in cases when your are already fully vaccinated… 
The smart ones will do the later 
Large scale home working is not going to work, ever. It is incredibly lonely and demotivating. It never worked in the past, and people don’t change over time. Most people just go nuts.
A well motivated older person, living in a pleasant country house, with friends hanging around, in a stable relationship, etc, and doing a job which has clear deliverables which can be done anytime, and probably going to the office 1 day a week to catch up, will work ok. And it always did.
It would also work in a “managed office” scenario where say 10-20 people, each with their room, work in some office area, with a shared social space in the middle, where they can meet up for a tea and a chat. The issue there is that there are very few of these, and they aren’t cheap. Small commercial spaces are always grossly overpriced.
It also works acceptably in low-end jobs where the employee has little power and is ok with being watched remotely (well, has no choice). One example is call centres. A lot of them are home based and have been for ages, but the calls are monitored. I think in some cases they are monitored on video too. Remote monitoring of screen content is also gaining traction in companies. You can do that job from anywhere, so long as you don’t have screaming kids running around. You can have flexible hours. For “social” you sod off to the pub in the evening
Anything else, forget it. The work just doesn’t get done. Even software tends to get done very slowly by (most) people working at home.
IMHO it should be legal to ask about vaccination status IF the employer is required to provide special measures in the absence of it. It is like asking a prospective employee if they are in a wheelchair, because if they are, you may have to spend tens of thousands converting the place to wheelchair access.
I think this CV19 stuff will die down eventually, but it may take a while.
In today’s paper is a full page on using vacc status to avoid return quarantine. Basically everybody in business is p1ssed off that the UK got a huge vaccine lead over everybody else and now it will chuck it away in the name of PC / equality / etc. So the pressure is building up, which is excellent.
Peter wrote:
And it always did.
It always did, but it wasn’t always permitted by the employer. Rather the opposite.
Yes; it depends on the power balance in the relationship. It also depends on how well the deliverables can be specified. You can’t have people work at home unless they can be pretty tightly specified, otherwise you will lose productivity, and even a 20% loss (which may not be visible in many occupations) means you now have to employ 20% more people, which will definitely wipe out the savings on rent etc.
You could pay people less because they save on travel expenses, but most people won’t settle for that I know that, from having interviewed people who work in London…
Interesting ruling in the UVDL versus Astra Zeneca court action:
You cannot compare the two.
Yet I can compare 35 and 38.000 dead people.
Vaccine wasn’t readily available in required quantities and we were helped by neighboring countries. I was 5 at that time but clearly remember queuing to be vaccinated.
Peter wrote:
I think this CV19 stuff will die down eventually, but it may take a while.
I think this is a significant challenge. After a campaign intended to scare the daylights out of people, rightly or wrongly, they don’t recover quickly and there are always those who derive power from their ongoing fear.
Peter wrote:
You could pay people less because they save on travel expenses, but most people won’t settle for that I know that, from having interviewed people who work in London
I would want to be paid more to compensate for the cost of an extra room in the house, or an existing room being lost to the interests of my employer. No free office rent in my house. Maybe for that reason I have yet to miss a day in the office due to CV-19, or work a day at home in my life
Peter wrote:
Large scale home working is not going to work, ever. It is incredibly lonely and demotivating. It never worked in the past, and people don’t change over time. Most people just go nuts.A well motivated older person, living in a pleasant country house, with friends hanging around, in a stable relationship, etc, and doing a job which has clear deliverables which can be done anytime, and probably going to the office 1 day a week to catch up, will work ok. And it always did.
I know some people have very firm views on this and those views may be correct when applied to certain situations, but not always.
I’ve worked from home full-time for at least six years now, having been with the company for just over 10. I’m fairly well-motivated, don’t know if I’m ‘older’ (39) and I do live in a pleasant country house with friends nearby, stable relationship etc. Deliverables are pretty clear, or more accurately I support and troubleshoot the clear deliverables of my team (who are also all home-based, mostly in the UK and one in Australia). I never go into the office, principally because it’s a 1.5hr drive and nobody in my part of the business works there – I would be driving 3hrs a day to sit on my own. Apart from my own team, most of my day-to-day work is with people in other countries – principally the United States, then Ireland and some other European countries. My boss is in Ireland.
Pre-covid we used to go to the office in Dublin (which is global HQ) for 2-3 days perhaps twice a year. Back when more money was spent on non-billable travel it was quarterly, and in 2012 when I was on a special project I went every other week. With the accountants having seen the difference that the cessation of all non-billable travel makes to the bottom line, I doubt it will ever restart except for the most urgent situations.
Most of the pharma industry is like this, and it does work. Part of the attraction is undoubtedly the freedom to live anywhere in the country without regard to employment. If my circumstances were different then I would obviously see things differently – for instance if the office was a 25min drive away and all my team were there, I would prefer to go in. If were in my 20s, had a flat in London and worked for e.g. a bank, I would want to go into the City rather than sit in my flat all day.
This BBC commentary on the EU court action outcome against AZ is interesting, including this
which suggests worldwide vaccine use is roughly inversely proportional to its price
Sinovac, Sinopharm, and Sputnik might be used gin more populous countries than some of the 130 AstraZeneca countries.
Silvaire wrote:
I would want to be paid more to compensate for the cost of an extra room in the house, or an existing room being lost to the interests of my employer. No free office rent in my house. Maybe for that reason I have yet to miss a day in the office due to CV-19, or work a day at home in my life
Homeoffice for me has been a very positive thing. I can not imagine and thankfully will not need to go back to ever working in a “battery” of 2×2 m workspaces on close contact with distracting people again.
In the comfort of my own home I have my work PC next to my normal one, can do the work much quieter, more efficiently and I can still take my kid to kindergarten and back, have lunch with my family and do not need to commute (even if that for me is a 10 min drive).
Most of my colleagues think alike. We would like to continue working like this, with the exception of getting together for needed meetings and possibly trainings, which work better in a presence form.
In general, for organisations relying on office work most of the time, this can be a huge profit. Alone the work space we rent at the airport which now has been empty for more than a year, our organisation pays high 6 figures p.a. What we really need are a couple of large meeting rooms, where we can have up to 30 people in safe distance from each other plus one or two smaller ones as well as an informal coffee-kitchen room. And of course the IT department where the servers and those things are and the operational rooms The rest can go back to the landlord for all I care, we don’t need it, I’d say 80% of the space.
I have several colleagues or people I know around here who have never actually set a foot into their companies premises more than for the interview and to take their materials the first day. Quite a few bankers around here all work from home, same goes for insurance agents and other office jobs.
I also can well imagine that office spaces will massively be converted into living spaces in the future, putting away the shortage of living space in the cities.
There is still a lot of jobs which obviously can not work home office, but those who can, I suppose it will be a huge benefit for just about everything. I don’t need additional pay for that as I already save loads of money for the PRIVILEGE of being able to work home: No more canteen food, no more fuel to drive to work, no more parking card. I’ve noticed that during Corona in general my expenses have gone down a good 30%, also because lots of expensive past times are no longer possible such as going to restaurants or cultural events (even though I’ve not done that in Switzerland ever, not worth it) and of course non-essential travel. For all I care, I like the current work-life balance much better than before. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to what I used to do before.
