Offices 2023

The Washington Post ran an article recently titled “Restaurants can’t find workers because they’ve found better jobs.” After restaurants shut down during the pandemic, many workers never returned. Where did they go?

The article quotes an economic researcher who says: “There’s been a shift away from the sectors where we have the most person-to-person contact. It feels like no one’s working, even though we can tell from government statistics that they are.”

This is indeed the mystery of our current economic situation—workers are disappearing, but the jobs numbers keep going up—over half a million jobs were added in January. So workers are fading from sight, but more and more jobs keep getting added. The article points out that a lot of workers “moved to behind-the-scenes office work where they are more likely to have increased flexibility, stability and often better pay. Employment in professional and business services — a catchall category that includes office jobs in accounting, law and other white-collar firms — has soared by 1.4 million during the pandemic.”

Professional and business services— “office services” is the better term I think—is where the workers are going. What is this? It’s basically someone in an office who doesn’t do real work but isn’t quite a janitor or manager or secretary. Janitors and secretaries, even managers, have real work to do—office services people really don’t.

And this is another mystery—as offices have gotten emptier due to the rise of work from home, huge numbers of workers are filling office services jobs. What’s going on?

Most of the people with real careers only come into the office Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. They are valuable and so they are granted the luxury of working from home on Monday and Friday. Office services people are there full-time—the job is to just sort of be there all the time, Monday through Friday, 9-5. Your function is just to have your presence there, to make the office feel like it’s a place where people go, so that when the people with careers come in during the middle of the week, they walk into a place that has some kind of pulse to it.

The commercial real estate industry would be destroyed if these silly offices weren’t open, but the most important workers don’t want to be there, so they need this other class of people to be there all the time, even though there’s nothing to do. It’s a weird new use of human capital—lending their human aura to the commercial real estate investment made by the corporation, so that it has a kind of essence to it and isn’t just an empty dead space when the important workers grace the office with their presence.

Office services people are a “team” of people who just hang out at the office. They eat the snacks. They drink the coffee. They make sure the printer has paper in it. They adjust the thermostat. But their real job is just to be there in the office so that it feels like a place that has people in it when the important employees saunter in.

These people usually get paid pretty well, at least in New York City—$25-$30 an hour is pretty common. Not bad for a job where you do nothing. There are lots of openings for these kinds of positions in New York right now—they’re a key part in the bosses’ goal of making sure employees come back to the office. The office can’t just be a place where employees begrudgingly go because they have to—those days are gone. The rise of work from home changed that forever. There has to be this group of middle tier people—not managers, not custodial staff, but somewhere in between—whose role is simply to exist in the office. The important workers need there to be something there when they come in, so it isn’t just dead. Their job is to imbue the office—which would otherwise be empty—with some kind of life.

If you’ve had a job lately, you’ve probably noticed a change in the language of work. Everyone uses the word “team” now. You aren’t a worker anymore—you’re a “team” member. You aren’t part of a company, you’re part of a team. Hardly any emails get sent nowadays that don’t have the word “team” in it. This shift has been big, but people didn’t really question it. Ten years ago, nobody really talked like this—now everyone does, and it seems normal to people.

The ideological function of this is pretty clear. Workers call themselves “team members” now because workers have rights, but team members don’t. If you’re on a team, you can just be cut. Work is more precarious under neoliberalism—you can lose your job at any time—but if you think of it as just a team thing, it doesn’t seem so bad. It’s just part of how a team works. So, the shift to team language at work is part of how neoliberalism controls us with positive psychology.

The team concept helps make more sense of this office services thing that’s happening. Every team needs bench players and locker room guys—teammates who never play, who don’t really contribute, but play an important role by cheering from the bench and keeping everyone loose in the locker room.

So who are the office services teammates cheering for? Partly for the star players, the people with actual careers who come into the office a few days a week. But more than that, they’re cheering for the office itself, as a physical location.