Article
Digital
Work
4 min read

Back to the office! The suspect motives behind the bosses calling for it

Working From Home isn’t the end of the world.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

An office wall displays a huge motto reading 'punch today in the face'
Really?
Johnson Wang on Unsplash.

If we’d been working from home in 1980, I wouldn’t have met my wife (as she, of course, then wasn’t). The slow demise of the office romance may not exclusively be driven by WFH, when a clumsy or unwanted speculative pass will likely precipitate a visit from the HR police. But it’s sure harder (I’m told) to chat someone up over Zoom than a water-cooler. 

There are some things you just, well, have to be there for. And it’s not just a matter of curating the gene pool for the future of the human race, which is hardly the top priority for most employers. Much more immediate commercial demands are served by employees being bodily present at work. They can check colleagues’ body language, be mentored more spontaneously, gossip about work, read the room and go outside for a fag with a friend. None of that works on a laptop at the kitchen table. 

And yet these aren’t aspects of working life that are much, if ever, cited by opponents of WFH. Yup, for these bosses, it’s always about productivity, which allegedly slumps like the shoulders of a college-leaver told to re-write their CV, when staff work from home. So companies as diverse as Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are demanding that their workers work five-day weeks at the office again.  

Except, two things: One, that productivity point isn’t true. Professor Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, has demonstrated empirically that a hybrid working model of three days at the office, plus two at home, is every bit as productive as fully office-based work overall. And, two, bosses may be shocked to learn that it’s their job to manage productivity, which is just as measurable at home as in the office. But then you don’t get to shout as much. 

And there I think is the real point. Bosses might not be shouty, but their motives for office work are more than suspect. They may be obsessed with control. They need to see their staff working for them for proof of productivity. They want to sit in a big glass-walled office watching them. And, perhaps most of all, if staff aren’t in the office then what’s the point of being a boss? It might bring their own productivity management and role into sharper focus. 

People who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not.

Furthermore, it’s been a long time, if ever, since some of those with the loudest voices calling for a return to the office have ever worked an ordinary job themselves. Lord Rose, formerly CEO of Marks & Spencer and chairman of Asda, told BBC’s Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” (not true – see above). 

And Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, formerly business secretary (remind me, how did that go?), continues in opposition to fight the bad fight to get civil servants as well as the private sector permanently back at the office. Hilariously, he most recently did so in a video from the drawing room of his mansion in Somerset. Though, to be fair, having lost his seat at the last general election and seeing his investment company sliding down the pan, he’s not so much working from home as just... at home.   

The serious point is that people who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not. They really don’t know – or have forgotten - what it is to have your life demanded of you from 9am-6pm from Monday to Friday in a location that is less than comfortable to work in. Is that so complicated to take aboard? 

And there’s another very big thing here. To demand office slaves is to commoditise people, to make them chattels (and, if some of these bosses were honest with themselves, that’s what they want). Staff become just another asset, not unlike the freehold of the office building in which you put them and watch as they make you money every day. 

To put it bluntly, that is a sin. To treat human beings as tradeable commodities is to debase their dignity. And for those of faith, that dignity is vested in each unique one of them bearing the image of God. As a good Catholic, Rees-Mogg should be familiar with the doctrine of Imago Dei.     

So there’s a holy, as well as secular, work-ethic at play here. The worker is worthy of his/her wage. That scriptural phrase usually focuses on the material value of the wage. But it’s also worth registering that the worker is “worthy”. 

To treat staff like they have an inherent worth, rather than simply a productive asset, has a value way beyond the money they are paid. And the dividends on that investment will be immense. Respect them. Let them work from home. 

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Review
Culture
Digital
Film & TV
Work
5 min read

Heaven can wait: the gig economy can’t

Good Fortune skewers modern work culture with a celestial twist

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

A film character talks to an angel in the street who has wings on the back of his coat.
Aziz Ansari and Keanu Reeves star.
Lionsgate.

Good Fortune sees a well-meaning but rather inept angel named Gabriel meddle in the lives of a struggling gig worker and a wealthy venture capitalist, with unpredictable results.  

The film follows Arj (Aziz Ansari), a frustrated documentary editor who is unable to get any steady employment and has been relegated to working in the gig economy, bowing and scraping to all app users for fear that they’ll give him a one-star review. Arj has resulted to sleeping in his car and is only one step away from being completely destitute. After a short trial period working as a personal assistant for bumbling millionaire Jeff (Seth Rogen) that ends badly, Arj reaches the end of his tether. Out of the blue, an angel named Gabriel (Keanu Reeves) appears to Arj, trying to show him that his life has meaning. In order to convince him, he swaps Arj’s life of poverty for Jeff’s of luxury in an attempt to show him that having money won't solve all his problems. But unfortunately for Gabriel, it does solve most of his problems, and Arj does not want to swap back.                                                    

Aziz Ansari writes and directs Good Fortune, making his directorial debut. Unfortunately, while this film may promise a lot, it sadly fails to deliver. The social commentary is on point, but the laughs are spaced very far apart. It manages to accurately diagnose the problems that society faces, namely that the gig economy created by big tech has taken us back to Victorian levels of economic uncertainty for many people. But the prognosis somehow seems to lack any punch when it’s finally delivered. Good Fortune feels like a mix of Trading Places, a cynical version of It’s a Wonderful Life, with a touch of the sitcom Superstore thrown in for good measure. It wears its influences on its sleeve, but never really coalesces into its own thing. The one area it does flex its muscles is the performances.  

Ansari’s Arj voices the frustration of a generation when he says, "I did everything I was supposed to do and nothing's working out”. It is quite enjoyable when Gabriel asks him if he has learned that being rich and privileged isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and Arj vehemently disagrees. Rather than learning any particular moral lesson, Arj has simply learned that it’s much nicer to be depressed in a mansion than in a hovel.  

Seth Rogen has the hapless privileged idiot down to a science at this point; there’s something cathartic about him seeing how difficult it is for people trapped in the gig economy. “This is too hard,” he despairs, “How do people do this, without just being miserable and angry, all the time?”  

Perhaps predictably, the stand-out performance is Keanu Reeves as Gabriel. Far from being a serenely wise archangel in this iteration, Gabriel is, by his own admission, a bit of a “dumb-dumb”. The film opens with Gabriel feeling frustrated in his current role, stopping people from texting and driving at the last possible moment. Gabriel feels desperate to change the course of someone’s life for the better. Gabriel’s meddling in Arj and Jeff’s lives is not looked on fondly by Martha, his superior (played by Sandra Oh). She makes Gabriel human as a punishment, sending him on a journey of self-discovery.  

After the weighty self-importance of the John Wick franchise, it is thoroughly enjoyable to see Keanu shifting into comedy mode. His Gabriel has a touch of his Bill & Ted performance, making him a naïve idiot who lights up the screen every time he’s on it. Seeing him enjoy tacos, milkshakes and ‘chicken nuggies’, simple pleasures that are so easily taken for granted, brings some much-needed levity to a script that doesn’t always manage to rise.  

In a sense, Good Fortune writes itself into a corner and can’t quite figure out how to get out of it. It feels like there’s a lot of time floundering around for an answer, which is frustrating, even at a brisk run time of 98 minutes. If there is any area that feels under-served it’s the sub-plot with Elena (played by singer and actress Keke Palmer). Serving as the love-interest for Arj, Elena seems to be the only one clear-eyed enough to see that systemic oppression requires an organised response, and is in the halting process of forming a union. Elena is the only one able to talk any sense into Arj when she says: “I’d rather be back down there, trying to help more of us get up here”.  

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