I love this excerpt from The Times:
Civil servants were told to get back to their offices to set an example as work from home guidance was dropped yesterday.
Government departments urged staff to return after Boris Johnson told them to “show a lead” after the end of plan B Covid-19 measures.
Well, yes. The only reason civil servants, and other workers, have been working from home is because their employer has told them to. The very idea that staff can merely be “urged to return” to their offices is a nonsense. Indeed, the implication is that employees are refusing to return to the office. Let’s be very clear about this: if they were to refuse, they’d soon be unemployed.
Idiot Iain Duncan Smith went further. The former work and pensions secretary said civil servants had failed to rise to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic “as the wartime generation would have done”, saying officials have instead “thrown their hands up in despair – before locking the doors and scuttling off home, of course”.
“When I think of all the brave civil servants who went to work in the 1940s, determined to do their bit regardless of the threat from falling bombs, I wonder what has happened to us as a nation.”
Ooh! He’s so hard. And straight away you run into some problems. Firstly, and most obviously, it would probably have been quite tricky for the war generation to work from home. It’s not as if they could have been provided with laptops and operated with a secure internet connection.
Like IDS, “I wonder what has happened to us as a nation” when people like IDS spout such obvious tosh. My experience of remote home working is that people have worked even harder than they did before and because many were no longer carrying out lengthy commutes they were more efficient.
I am guessing these shit bag politicians are merely using civil servants as a human punchbag to detract from their many failings. Maybe they’ve got also got shares in the greedy train companies and empty coffee houses in city centres. Either way, their words are nothing to do with the well-being of working people. It’s the economy, stupid. If these toads really gave a shit about well-being, they’d take mental health seriously.
I’ll say it again, people are working from home because they have been told to work from home. In many cases, employers have been getting more bang for their buck thanks to home-working. I’d have thought hybrid working would be a good solution, with staff working from home and from the office, where they can. But don’t expect the politicians to see it like that.
