Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely(theatlantic.com) |
Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely(theatlantic.com) |
And people will accept it, because they'll be fired if they refuse and someone more desperate will deal with it so long as they get paid at some point.
Pretty much everyone wants to go this direction. The problem is that there are still serious hurdles in place -- mainly due to the nature of the work, or cultural/interpersonal challenges.
The only solution seems to be:
1. Universal Basic Income - ie. giving people the freedom to say no to sh*tty jobs rather than being forced to take the least bad offer
2. Make a law that gives employees the right to work remotely if their job can reasonably be done remotely
Great for the people in those places, but your happiness to be able to skip the commute may quickly turn into a lot of unhappiness because you can't make a living wage anymore.
My personal ideal is a dedicated office space in a location very close to my home, like in the nearest downtown, where I would pay a certain amount per month in return for a set of days on which I could reserve personal office space.
The issue with working from home for me is that I feel my personal life and work life become messy and entangled if I do too much work at home. Similar to how good sleep hygiene involves doing as few activities other than sleeping on your bed as possible, I feel for my mental wellbeing it's better to physically separate my work life and home life as much as possible.
Granted I don't hate commuting. Since I take the bus I get a significant amount of reading done.
It's great to change one's work environment every now and then. When I used to work in offices, many days I'd be sick of my office and want to work somewhere else, if only to change things up.
It's the places that can't go remote that is the problem, and those are exactly the places where they need to be open many hours, in order for customers to be able to come.
It feels almost like this would be the most socially responsible thing to do: reduce the effective R0 and allow things to start getting back to normality.
I'm the farthest thing from a "reopen" protester. But I can't help thinking that as a young and healthy individual, this is a valid option that nobody is talking about.
Loop: 1) Work monday-friday 6 hours practise strict social distancing. Work remote if you can. 2) Weekend rest from social distancing see friends.
Its like a binary four square wave with on / off.
Reason: If we practice good social distancing the spread time of the Covid is five days.
Employees will love it, that's for sure, but I don't think employers will get even. You are basically giving your employees a 25% raise on their hourly wage.
There are success stories of companies that pay their employees above market value, either by paying them the same amount for less work, paying them more, or giving them particularly good perks. It is the idea of quality over quantity: by giving out preferential treatment, you get the best employees, and keep them motivated, and their increased productivity will make up for the higher cost. But there are success stories going the other way too: cheap, borderline slave labor and a high turnover. Sometime a high volume of low quality work is effective.
But in most cases, the usual market value is what works best, that's why it is the market value.
I am not saying that working less is bad, but it is a bit unfair to have the employer shoulder all the costs. Maybe make it half/half: 10% less pay for 20% less work.
Value in the economy is created by work and there is simply no substitute for that. Shortening the work week would simply make less value in the economy, making us all poorer and more idle.
Too much idleness I can tell you leads to stress, even more stress than too much work. 40 hours is not too much work.
To solve the problem in the article one could still cut the workforce by half that was present in the office simply by adding more work-from-home time for the workers which I find to be healthy my own experience anyway. our office is made similar overtures, saying when we go back to work lots of us. Be working from home as a way to tackle a space issue.
[1] https://satisologie.substack.com/p/the-makeup-of-a-dollar
In some kinds of jobs this may be true, but in others-- especially ones with substantial intellectual or creative components-- it isn't.
In some cases studies have showed increased output from reduced working hours.
And we still don't know if catching one strain once confers immunity, or for how long. So you won't be "done with it".
If you do get sick you become a burden on an overloaded healthcare system.
The people talking about this option are rightly being shut down.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2... [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-som...
- COVID puts even some of the young and healthy into the ICU
- there are reports of serious long term damage even in mild/asymptomatic cases, so you might be immune until the next big pandemic but your lungs may be busted forever
1. Execution - it's not enough to tell the young and healthy "go get coughed on". Intentionally infecting a significant percentage of the population would almost certainly lead to an outbreak in the remaining population unless extreme care was taken. Keep in mind that a bunch of these young people won't have any symptoms at all- and we probably don't have the resources to test all these young people. The outcome would be too predictable- some young people would want to leave home after a week thinking they never got sick, and then would spread the disease to their community.
2. Politics and fairness - who are the ones most incentivized to be intentionally infected? Who are the ones most capable of declining this program and continuing to isolate at home for the next N months as needed?
Any politician who suggests this plan will be accused of sacrificing the poor and the blue collar, as they are the ones who can't just work remotely for the next year.
Personally, as a WFH-capable employee I would sit this out. Why should I go through this when I'm capable of effectively disappearing from society until the pandemic is over? I'm sure many other office workers agree.
Putting these two points together, this is neither something that we should encourage individuals to do of their own right (lest they fuck it up and hurt their community), nor something any politician would (probably) ever try to coordinate and execute at scale.
Consider volunteering for a "challenge vaccine trial": https://1daysooner.org/
We still don't know enough about this thing, though we are learning more by the day.
As the magic 8 ball says: ask again tomorrow.
And those are just the public health benefits. Saving millions of jobs and livelihoods is no small benefit either.
The end result of all this is you would get sick and then be at risk of getting sick again next year and the year after that all the while putting at risk anyone who is vulnerable.
There is really only one way out of this mess - a vaccine.
(I'm no fan of oversimplification, but this is what's at stake.)
Sars-2 is you get it, and then you get some amount of permanent damage to your lungs and cardiovascular system.
The reason most people still go to the office is because of the hurdles I mentioned above.
Yes, there is certainly a lot of work can’t be done behind a computer, or workforces that can’t effectively collaborate over a computer. But I don’t think that means they wouldn’t if they could.
You are right that the worse the infection the longer the immunity, but if we are looking at the young they have a mild disease so we should expect a short immune lifetime.
Edit. Have a look at Figure 3 of this pre-print[0]. This doesn’t encourage me that we can expect a long immune lifetime with SARS-CoV-2.
0. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v...
Kidney failure could explain the swelling of feet, cardiac issues, and strokes being observed in Covid-19 infected cases.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v...
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/22/health/strokes-coronaviru...
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21244171/stroke-coronavirus-sym...
I just don't think that works. I think we're going to have to end up making some hard choices about acceptable risk, and how we can use that to get to a better outcome.
There isn't one. Government has done little to nothing with the time they bought with our sacrifices. Mostly this is due to the fact there isn't a lot TO do - getting the hundreds of millions of tests that people want so some large percentage of the country can be tested daily is impossible anytime soon due to raw materials/resources.
Governments release plans to reopen that don't feature a single metric that holds them accountable, much less anything resembling open source / open data that drives their decisions. They bastardize the word "science" as something they are theoretically being guided by. The first tenets of science are transparency, open data, and falsifiability. No plan put forth by a state fits these criteria.
Anyone who points this out on Hacker News is downvoted massively, as you are undoubtedly noticing. As someone on Twitter very aptly put it, the Slack/Zoom/WFH class is more than happy to act sanctimonious about the whole thing while unemployment marches on to 20%.
EDIT:
>> making some hard choices about acceptable risk
People are bad at evaluating risk. Think about all the "Project Zero" slogans out there - no deaths from not wearing a seatbelt, no cancer deaths, no XYZ, no accepting risk of contracting COVID-19 until we get a perfect vaccine, etc. All completely unattainable. But if you point that out or try to have a conversation about it, someone swings down from the top rope with a story about how their grandma died of COVID-19 or that one young person somewhere died of it or had permanent scarring of their lungs (nevermind the statistics showing median age of death from COVID-19 being extremely high and the reproducibility of the lung damage being quite poor) and then you get massively booed and sometimes doxxed/reported to your employer.
It's politically untenable to talk about risk, hence a bunch of halfcocked "plans" of locking everyone in their houses to hide from the virus. We went from "don't overwhelm hospitals" to justifying layoffs/furloughs in hospitals nationwide by saying "oh you want to reopen? well volunteer your grandma to get it first" pretty quickly.
If people were good about evaluating risk, we wouldn't have the lottery fund education, for example.
I'd never thought it all the way through until last night. But I don't see how we make it though this without something on par with the Great Depression.
Right now Microsoft and Amazon have this little bump due to WFH and stockpiling, giving tech workers reason for hope, but that'll start fading soon and they'll go down with everyone else.
It's the whole boiling frog parable really, isn't it.
* Some virus in China: no big deal it's China.
* Some virus here: no big deal it'll blow over.
* Lots of virus here: no big deal we'll WFH for a while.
* "A while" is up and more virus: no big deal we'll keep WFH.
* Unemployment is 6M/wk: no big deal look at AMZN/MSFT.
* Pork processing plant shuts down: no big deal there's other food.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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This should scare the shit out of everyone still living.
People talk about a V-shaped recovery, but I think we're very close to the tipping point. This depends on the existence of expendable pocket money for the public, an existing supply chain, and stable cash flow. All of this will be gone in about two months. If we're stuck with this for two years? There will be no product to buy, nobody to buy it, and no infrastructure to build it. Home values will drop, people will default, and the whole country from NY to SF to Dubuque will look like Detroit of 2008 or worse, cities and suburbs alike, but there won't be a "not-Detroit" of investors to come and fix things this time. Most of us who are young, intelligent tech workers living through a 13-year boom cycle have a hard time understanding this.
Not looking forward to this. The lone bright spot, China (assuming they're able to keep things in check) starts hiring the brightest from around the world, and that's how this empire ends.
People think this has a major negative impact on the national debt, and while it's somewhat concerning, it's really not that much of an issue as long as people want our debt that we denominate in our own currency.
The problem is that populism will continue grow unchecked as the asset classes are bailed out and their assets are propped up and backstopped by the Fed, while the common man gets a smaller and smaller share of the bailout funds. Politicians will quite rightly point this out and will use it as a lever in their campaigns. If it all sounds familiar... well, the man currently in office is an expert at that angle.
That doesn't mean we aren't fucked. I am merely saying that it's pretty unclear what the future holds, as evidenced by the stock market's precarious position.
I definitely never think about working at any company that wanted employees installing keyloggers. As software engineers thankfully we're in enough demand to where I don't see it getting that extreme, but I could see that scenario for more oversupplied industries. In any case, the requirement of that kind of surveillance software to do one's job should be made illegal.
There are people out there saying a minimum wage of $7.25 is too high and we should get rid of it entirely. I think in many places, workers would fear they'll lose even more by striking for privacy.
The people that take the side of the employer are broadly the corporate owned media, but when hearing the labor side of the story, the public is often sympathetic because the majority of people are workers, not employers.
> There are people out there saying a minimum wage of $7.25 is too high and we should get rid of it entirely.
Those people are not the ones being subjected to such wages. People's political analysis is largely directed by material self interest. The vast majority of the population is made of precarious workers who resent the people that would say that.
They could possibly get away with it by paying exceedingly well. But that would afford workarounds, like buying a work-only computer for the spyware to live on.