Why is work still stuck in the 1930s?
We’ve been enduring labour relations derived from the 1935 Wagner Act and maybe, just maybe, this model doesn’t really work for highly-educated, self-motivated, professional knowledge-economy workers.
When they write the obituary of the COVID-19 pandemic there will be a chapter in there somewhere about how it got us, through gritted teeth and lots of resistance, to move away from a model of labour relations derived from a century-old American legislation to something better suited to highly-educated, mobile, flexible and self-motivated knowledge economy workers.
Which wouldn’t be saying much.
I wrote my Ottawa Citizen column on the section of the PSAC deal that says requests for remote work have to be handled individually by managers and I am about fit to be tied.
When you are dealing with highly-educated, highly-skilled professionals, what do you care where they sit to do their job? Or, frankly, what time they do it at? You can certainly set some expectations that you need to know they are reachable during specified hours, but if your highly creative, self-motivated employee finds that she does her best work at the pool while her teenager trains with their swim team, what do you care that the work gets done at 5 am instead of 1 pm in the office?
And no, you don’t get to talk about productivity. Employees who deliver on their deliverables are productive, no matter where they are or what time they’re up.
In the end it comes down to trust and control freakery. And really, if you are the kind of manager who doesn’t trust their employees to do their work unless you are directly watching them, don’t be surprised to find yourself alone as all your best employees leave you one after the other to go work for someone who treats them with the respect they’ve earned.
But meanwhile, what to do with all those office buildings and empty sad downtowns. Which, in the case of Ottawa, isn’t anything new. It was sad and empty before the pandemic, too. And while this town has never been credibly accused of being at the cutting edge of anything remotely smart or progressive, there are good people here pushing to turn some federal government buildings into affordable housing. Calgary is already way ahead of us on this.
I am aware that it’s not as simple as all that, and also not cheap. That’s no excuse not to do it where and when feasible.
The downtowns that will survive will be those that have lots of humans deliberately choosing to spend significant time there, either because they live there or play there or both. The downtowns that insist on returning to 9-5 partial life support with employees that were coerced back into their cubicles will not be places that thrive in the near future. In fact they’re already dying, half-way desiccated.
Municipal authorities have to find ways to make their downtowns attractive, places people want to go for fun, not because they have to.
And employers have to move into the 21st century.