Work From Home vs Capitalism

During the pandemic, much was made of how Work From Home (WFH) was going to be the future. People could live wherever they wanted and work from home. But over the last couple of years, corporate America has made it very clear that they will not tolerate this. Big companies set deadlines for when WFH would end, and it has ended for most workers, with in-office work back at pre-pandemic levels for the most part.

So why did it end? Workers obviously liked it, for the most part—why would you want to spend time commuting and wasting away in a boring office, making small talk with your stupid coworkers? But it ended. The obvious thing to say is that it ended because workers don’t have power in capitalism—their employers do. And that’s true. But why would employers demand that workers return? It wasn’t necessarily the case that workers were less productive with WFH. In fact, a Stanford study found that WFH actually made employees more productive. Still, the employer and CEO class was firm—WFH was not to be tolerated. Mark Zuckerberg said that in-person work is “better”; former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer said WFH made workers less efficient. Elon Musk also famously hated WFH. The list goes on. This wasn’t true—WFH did not decrease productivity at all—but the capitalist class was united in their opposition to it.

The question is—why? If productivity was the same, or better, why should it matter? Because capitalism isn’t just about production and labor—it’s about time.

In the capitalist wage system, we think we sell employers our labor, but we really sell our time—and this is why Work From Home couldn’t be tolerated by corporations, it made “work” all about the labor delivered, and not about the time that they own you.

If work became just about the actual work—the value we produce and deliver for the employer—then that would make workers more free, and that could not be tolerated.

In a capitalist work relation, employers rent us for eight hours a day, five days a week. So what if we can produce the work product that the job requires without entering the office for that set chunk of time—the productivity doesn’t matter, the amount of time we submit to the employer matters.

Corporate capitalist work is much more about social control than about producing actual valuable goods, services, or products for the employer. It is about getting in the habit of submitting to go into a certain place for a certain amount of time every day. And with WFH, employers couldn’t keep track of your time—your time was mostly your own, you could do what you wanted with it, as long as you were productive and delivered the work product that the job required.

But this upset the most important customer in capitalism—the employer class. As a worker, your employer is your customer, and you sell them your time—and the customer is always right. Time is the most valuable commodity that there is. The employer-customer class wants their commodity delivered in a certain way—and employees coming into the office 40 hours a week (at least) is how they like it.

There has been much made lately about artificial intelligence (AI) taking everyone’s job, but I think this is mistaken. I don't think AI will replace many jobs, because in capitalism, your employer doesn't buy your labor, it buys your time. And you get paid more if your time is more valuable than the time of another worker. But with AI/robot “workers,” their time isn't valuable at all, because they have nothing but time—and employer-customers don’t want to buy time from a source like that. They want their purchase of time to have value—they want it to come from a finite source, and humans have finite time, so that makes the time valuable. A machine or algorithm or AI or whatever has infinite time, so that makes their time less valuable—and employer-customers don’t want to buy something that is of little value.