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by blowski 1773 days ago
Your comment makes it sound like everyone who lives in a city is a hipster quaffing expensive coffees and wearing silly t-shirts, doing social media influencing. Those are exactly the kind of people who will benefit from remote working.

I'm talking about cleaners, administrators, callcentre workers, fast food staff, delivery drivers, supermarket shelf stackers, etc, living in a small flat in an unfashionable neighbourhood. They suffer very much from social exclusion, and handwavy arguments about how everything will just work itself out sounds naive and silly.

1 comments

I m confused, you said i was excluding unattached sw devs, but now you say that these are the people who will benefit most. I also don't understand how RW will affect non-remote blue collar workers in any negative way
Right, I see my comment before was a bit confusing. I'll rephrase.

For a software dev (especially those with a few years of experience), work tends to be easy to come by. We pick up our laptop, tether to our mobile phone, whack out a few CVs and offers come flooding in. If you're unattached (single, no dependents) you can work from wherever you like - you write some code, push it to Git, and deploy to a server.

But most people's jobs and lives don't look like that. They are rooted by partners, children or elderly relatives. By jobs that require you to be there in physical form. By personalities that struggle with an immense amount of change. By pay structures and pensions that reward longevity.

To your last point, about how it remote working will have a negative effect on blue collar workers:

1. If remote-working is a human right, then it must be granted to ALL workers - regardless of the shade of their collar. I'm extremely sceptical that work requiring a physical presence will see a huge boost in wages. Thus, it risks merely be a perk offered to those already well compensated.

2. Since remote-working tends to benefit who already have large houses, fast internet, good technology, and good networks, it entrenches their position. If you currently earn minimum wage serving burgers in McDonalds, and can't afford a good laptop and internet connection, you will find it hard to even get on the ladder where remote-working is a norm. Thus it will most likely reduce social mobility.