Is Working From Home Really Working?

Embedded in the title above are two distinct questions. The first question, a personal one, is whether those who work from home actually do any productive work. The second question, a communal one, is whether working from home works to improve the culture and the economy. My answer is “sometimes” for Question 1 and a hard “no” for Question 2.

My concerns were reinforced on a wintry 1-degree morning in mid-February when I heroically left my cozy home and drove through the snow to my office. Although I could work just as easily at home, and save a little rent, I braved the elements because I am much more productive at my office. 

I have no TV, no refrigerator, no microwave, no coffeepot, no easy chair, and no one to assign me chores unrelated to my work. Extrapolating from my own distractions, which do not include children or pets, I have got to believe that remote work diminishes overall productivity. 

I have to concede, however, that a busy office has its own distractions. As a case in point, it is the rare remote worker—CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin being a notable exception—that harasses a co-worker from afar, sexually or otherwise. Thus, Question 1 above nets a “sometimes.”

From a communal perspective, I would argue that remote work has a net negative impact. Although the work the laptop crowd does is rarely essential and often frivolous, members of that cohort have been dictating social policy for a generation now, and especially so since COVID-19. Until recently, they have met with little managerial resistance or moral pushback. For years, in fact, cities have vied with each other to recruit the so-called “creative class.”

Alas, the more successful of the creative cities, Seattle and San Francisco most prominently, have been sapping their own communal health with each new recruit. A recent report, for instance, showed that “San Francisco’s famously flexible work-from-home policies” were costing the city billions in lost revenue from things like dining, entertainment and shopping—the things that make a city a city and that once made San Francisco America’s city of choice. 

In no city, however, have workers ducked work more eagerly than have our friends in Washington, D.C. Despite gentle nudging by President Biden, a shockingly high 43 percent of them were working remotely at the end of his term. This, nearly five years after the nation’s first reported case of the Wuhan Flu. I can imagine writers and designers and other creatives working productively from home, but I have a hard time imagining what middle managers at, say, HUD or HHS could possibly have been doing with their time from remote locations.

Along with Seattle and San Francisco, Washington is one of the three cities whose commercial life has been most seriously affected by the abandonment of the workplace. As one business owner observed, “Since the pandemic, it’s been really dead down here. Money hasn’t been flowing around, and people haven’t been downtown working in the commercial buildings. It has definitely been empty.”

By early 2024, Mayor Muriel Bowser had ordered D.C. workers back to the office and urged Biden to do the same. Their absence was killing her city. As The New York Times reported in May 2024, the White House’s tolerance of remote work “put real-estate companies and local businesses at odds with the federal government.” Tens of thousands of federal workers still sitting in their suburban homes “were hastening Washington’s fiscal and social decline.”

For all its liabilities, however, Washington is the one city whose work-force problems are most easily resolved. As President Clinton’s adviser Paul Begala said upon learning of the joys of the executive order, “Stroke of the pen, law of the land, kinda cool.”

President Trump found executive orders “kinda cool” as well. On Day One of his presidency, he ordered heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of government to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in person.”

The moaning from federal workers could be heard in West Virginia, but Trump has never received better press in D.C. Shouted one local headline, “Downtown DC businesses celebrate federal return to office policy.” So heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it was off to work the federal employees did go. 

Quick trivia question: what kind of work did Snow White’s seven dwarves do? Answer, they worked in a diamond mine, pick-axes in their calloused little hands. And that brings me to the deeper communal disorder implicit in remote work: the people who work the hardest get none of the benefit. 

On the wintry day in question, I passed at least four clusters of men outside in the cold, doing the kind of brute work that allows the rest of us to enjoy amenities like, say, heat and light. If I don’t make a deadline for a column, no one suffers. If these guys don’t show up, we’re living in a third-world country.

I say “men” and “guys” with full intent. When the temperature drops below freezing, women are rarely seen doing outside work. When it drops below zero, they vanish. This is not to diminish the role of women. This is to applaud them for their sanity. They figured things out a long time ago.

On this particular morning, UMKC canceled classes, but my McDonald’s did not cancel coffee. The women who work there were on the job at 6 a.m. They make less in a day than a professor does in an hour, but they bitch about their pay less in a year than a professor does at the average cocktail party. 

“You know, the people who fix your house can’t work from home,” Elon Musk recently said to a laptop crowd, “but you can? Does that seem morally right? It’s messed up.” 

Musk continued, “People should get off their goddamn moral high horse with their work-from-home (B.S.). Because they’re asking everyone else not to work from home while they do.” 

I can’t say that I disagree.