When I was at uni, it was the students, not the staff, who went on strike. There were, of course, many fewer unis and students and the staff couldn’t be sacked and had great pensions. In all public sector jobs, that balanced the fact that pay was lower, and now those lovely final salary pensions are being rather brutally cut. In my day, the students might have joined their lecturers on the picket line. Most current students of my acquaintance, however, would have rather more sympathy if they saw a staff member more than once a fortnight. There hasn’t, it seems, been much of a rush back to ‘face-to-face’ teaching in many a college; and you can, let’s face it, sit and look at a computer anywhere.
“The working-from-home illusion fades”
Are workers working from home more or less productive than those catching the 7.02am to London Bridge every day? ‘Probably sitting at home in their bleedin’ jim-jams’, said someone recently of a less-than-helpful call centre employee, the assumption being that, were they surrounded by colleagues and with a manager cracking the whip, he or she would have sorted his energy bill more efficiently.
