Tl/Dr; Turning over part of your home to your boss rent and utility free may not feel worth it for everyone. We should talk about that
I see semi frequent posts against the push from the white house own down for office workers to return to the office full time and wondering whether we are also thinking about the potential consequences and hidden costs to the worker of transitioning to a permanent work from home situation. I don't mean the landlords losing money or whatever, because fuck them, or the lack of interaction with coworkers, which might have social ramifications for sure, I mean the actual financial costs
My situation is that they are closing our office and switching us entirely to a work from home position. Which I understand from my employer's perspective, because what we do is largely a “in the field” type job and most of my coworkers have only been in the office once a week to print and shred and mail things for about two years. We all have agency laptops and phones with hotspot access and work through a VPN because the expectation is that we are doing visits and field work and writing casenotes in our cars sometimes, so that puts us ahead of the game and ultimately not having an office space is reasonably feasible for us.
The whole thing has gotten me thinking a lot about how some of my employer's savings are actually being passed on to my coworkers and I though.
So, for example, now my employer doesn't pay rent to their landlord. Ok fine. Only they are now effectively using space in my home and my coworkers homes rent free instead. I am working on creating a home office as we transition, as I will need to have room for files, the printer/scanner/copier, the shredder, office and mailing supplies ect. It isn't a lot of space as we have been scanning and digitizing everything we are able to but my house is small and the bedrooms are tiny, so I'm essentially one of the tiny bedrooms to them instead of using it for what I want. I had planned to start home brewing beer and mead again when I moved out here and was thinking of using that room for fermentation, but that plan will no longer work. My employer said I could take my desk home, but its giant and my house is small, so I had to buy my own desk. I spent time (on the clock of course) yesterday cleaning out the closet in that room and relocating what I was storing there, which meant reorganizing other areas of the home. The whole time I'm thinking “how much space am I willing to give them? How do I keep their stuff isolated from my life.” I ended up ordering a cabinet for office supplies to go in as well.
Essentially I am taking a room I could have used for my hobbies and interests or even rented out to a tenant and made income off of, and instead I am turning it over to my employer, for free. This isn't very hard for me as I am single and fortunate enough to own my house (thank you settlement with crooked landlord), but for a lot of my coworkers with similarly small homes with spouses and kids in them or who are renting apartments or have roommates, this is actually an extremely big deal. One of my coworkers had to tell her teenagers they either had to go to sharing a room with each other or share a room with mom's office for example. Another has had no choice but to get rid of furniture to create an office space in her bedroom and her husband is understanding but not pleased.
And there are other issues. Internet is a big obvious one. I am lucky enough to live in a place with good internet service, but not everyone is. My supervisor for example lives out in the country and has metered internet access, so our employer told her to just use the hotspot on the work phone. Only she doesn't get service with our employer's chosen network. So she's either got to drive into town anyways and work at Dunkin or something, or she's got to use her limited internet data for work without compensation. Even in my case where I don't have metered internet access, when it comes down to it, my employer used to pay for internet in my office, now I'm paying for internet in my home office.
And to get into the nitty gritty of it, all of our utilities are likely to go up. When we had an office, our employer paid to keep us in a climate controlled environment for the time we were here. Now we pay for that at home. That might not seem like much, but think about air conditioning, some workers switching to work from home might end up running the air conditioners 8-10 hours a day more than they would otherwise. If you work from home, your boss is saving that money and passing the expense on to you. Energy costs are just going to go up, that feels worth noting
Of course all of these costs of a home office are potentially tax deductible in the US, but the standard deduction is so high it might not be worth deducting for the average American worker, who will just eat these costs.
Finally, and more to the future and dystopian thinking, because we know American employers at least have no problem going dystopian. There are potential privacy ramifications as employers will now want to make decisions about how to ensure and increase productivity for at home workers. I could see a future where it is relatively normal for an employer to require you to install a camera in your home so they can “supervise” you during work hours. And honestly, if you are using a laptop, phone or tablet owned by your employer, it is already entirely possible for them to check that you are working by activating the camera on the device. Right now I think those prospects would be legally dubious, but we all know they'll try to get the laws changed if they think they can make money by doing so. It really may become commonplace for new hires to be expected to sign a waiver allowing their supervisors to monitor them during business hours.
In the end, especially given gas prices and commute times, this all may be worth the trade off for a lot of people. It might seem like a reasonable compromise to some to rent part of your home to your employer only you actually pay the rent and all the utilities and maybe they watch you in your office sometimes if you don't have to commute. No judgement if that is the case, but I think it's important that workers be thinking about the hidden consequences of pushing for permanent and widespread work from home. Organizers should be thinking about this stuff too, so they can agitate and organize for work from home workers to have some rights in these areas