Remote workers of the world, unite!

A few nights ago on Twitter, I quipped that I was planning to launch a trade union for remote workers. With dues of £10 a year, but membership of 200 million worldwide, I planned to become the Jimmy Hoffa of Zoom (my colleague Jamie McClellan, clearly a Microsoft fan, suggested we call ourselves the Teamsters). If our demands for swivel chairs were not met, we would threaten to homework-to-rule — sitting with our backs to brightly lit windows, perhaps, or running vacuum cleaners in mid-presentation.

But in a way, a million or so Londoners are already doing something similar by refusing to travel to work. This is a white-collar strike — or more accurately a strike by people who normally wear collars demanding the right to work dressed like Dominic Cummings.

And seated beside my brazier (technically a John Lewis firepit), I support my comrades in the remote-worker’s struggle. Unlike the often Luddite demands of strikers, this is the opposite. It is a campaign to allow technology to deliver its promised benefits to the quality of working life. If such a movement failed to take shape before, it was only because, while many of us suspected we ourselves could work effectively from home, nobody (even me) believed such a system could function at scale. We do now. It echoes John Locke’s famous locked-room analogy: we did not feel imprisoned before, because we did not know we were locked in. Now everyone knows there is a door.

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Julie Burchill

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Various economists, most notably Keynes, theorised that as wealth grew, people would work shorter hours. But this narrow model of exchange — time for money — fails to capture something we prize as highly as leisure which lies outside the realm of economics: personal autonomy.