Workers of the World, Congregate!
Much of my mental space was taken up, last week, by two connected but separate conversations. The first thread was with a friend who runs a consultancy ― a modest outfit at the cutting-edge of research on the domestic economy. Like most Lagos residents, she has had to do all of her work from home over the last two weeks. Given to mulling over the grander significance for others’ businesses of changes in operating conditions and proffering advice for improvements thereto, it was no surprise that she called to run by me her musings on the first round lessons from the COVID-19-inspired lockdown. “Why”, she asked, “were we previously having to wake up at ungodly hours to beat Lagos’ infernal traffic, running a gauntlet of security incidents on our back at night, when we all could have worked from home?”
READ ALSO: Breaking: Nigeria reports 362 confirmed cases of COVID-19
Across the many online collaborative platforms ― Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype, etc. ― it appears far easier to move documents around and edit them than before. And that was not all. Even for those assignment where the work scope had included onsite meetings with clients, these had taken place effortlessly across the country. Her concern? The traditional workplace is not going to recover from this. Indeed, part of the impulse for calling was that she had suggested on her office’s on-line bulletin board that they consider scaling down their offline operations. Drop the fancy headquarters. Lease a much smaller three bedroom apartment from which those necessary in-person meetings could be carried out.
But then, the bulletin board went mute. So, what did I think of the idea? Two concerns for me. First, by moving work home, businesses will not simply cut some costs, they would instead transfer these costs to staff working online from their homes. Then, is the whole point of the office not that shared costs are more efficient than fragmented ones? Incidentally, she had gotten her finance function to work out the variable costs that had been saved from staff working at home ― diesel for the generator for instance ― and had divvied this up and paid to staff as an inconvenience allowance. So, to a large extent the conversation around how not to transfer costs has begun.
How about the emergence of a new labour aristocracy ― able to work from home and willing to tolerate higher levels of intrusion by work into life? Besides, because they would, by not having to commute daily to work, have eliminated some expenditure lines, perhaps they’d be richer on account of this. Conversely, blue collar workers run a large risk of a massive cull of their ranks ― restaurants, the airlines, hotels, etc. Now this is not an idle concern. The argument that the new workplace and the ethos of the gig-economy have seen capital take more of the value produced by society than was traditionally the case was still raging before this pandemic threatened all as we know it. Can societies thus burdened already bear the additional pressure from new social fissures?
My consultant friend was convinced that in order to prevent the build up of inequalities up to the point where they might imperil societies’ existence, the state will have to acquire stronger redistributive powers and competences. Yet, there is this indeterminate (and not necessarily positive) quality to her “stronger state” argument. If Thomas Piketty’s underlining of the tensions between labour and capital, as the latter takes more of the social product, is worrisome, then Raghuram Rajan’s insistence on strengthening communities as counterbalance to the market and government acquires a new salience. Especially given how much power governments have already appropriated, as the need to contain this pandemic presses.
The second leg of the conversation was with this friend who is a big cheese in banking. Reflecting on his industry’s response to the lockdown in some states, he’d inflicted on me his concerns with the changes to banks’ branching operations that the current adjustments to the pandemic will invite. He wondered why banks should continue to bear the costs of processing cash, when they could move their big customers online, and their retail customers on to the agent banking platform, especially in the rural areas. Indeed, he’d argued that there is a strong case for looking at the way relationship managers in the retail segment are rewarded. He seemed to favour a commission-based regime.
If business was going to change radically post-COVID-19, this management genus is going to be the driving force. So, what did he think about the consultant’s concerns? Gregarious to a fault, he was sure that the only thing that made working from home currently attractive is the element of compulsion. Man, he swore, is a social animal. And the office is the quintessential social space. Thus, as with the urge by people of religion to break restrictions on movement in order to worship as they are wont to, or with the reluctance of patrons of shopping outlets and restaurants to stay away from these places until they were compelled to, the office will remain an alluring destination for the worker, especially at the end of this pandemic.
Workers of the world may yet continue to congregate, even if they are no longer capable of uniting.
