Opinion | Work From Home Isn’t Always Good
To the Editor:
Re “The Five-Day Office Week Is Over,” by Nicholas Bloom (Opinion guest essay, Oct. 22):
Mr. Bloom writes that Americans work about one-third of their workdays at home and that remote work has become normal. He names benefits: savings of time and money spent getting to work and flexibility for parents.
But this is true only for a fraction of Americans; many essential kinds of work cannot be done remotely as effectively or at all. Consider teachers (which I am), health care providers, people who work in service jobs and many others.
Economic and status hierarchies that pervade our society are widened by the sharp divide between those who can do their work remotely and those who cannot. I wonder also about the continued erosion of the social fabric as people interact less across differences and spend more time in their own environments.
As helpful as Zoom is, it is no substitute for being in spaces with others across the day. Even when interacting with others in person is challenging, without it we are likely to become more and more isolated and sealed in narrower circles of relationships and communication.
When we look around at what is happening in this country and around the world, is this really a good direction to be heading?
Deborah Loewenberg Ball
Ann Arbor, Mich.
To the Editor:
Nicholas Bloom gushes that the work-from-home revolution is “profoundly positive for the majority of America’s businesses and workers’’ and that “remote work has been good for almost everyone involved.”
But he ignores the greatest losers in this game of empty office chairs: the commercial property owners and their lenders who are sitting with partly empty buildings in almost all major U.S. cities.
More and more office users are reducing their office space requirements, new leasing has slowed to a crawl, and even when leases are consummated they come with large landlord concessions that drive down the net effective value of the leases.
When combined with rising interest rates, tightened lender requirements and dropping cash flow, the reduced office occupancy is pushing commercial real estate to the wall. If this leads to a spate of loan defaults and owners handing over the keys to lenders we will see a number of banks and other real estate lenders in grave economic danger, which will have a significant effect on the wider economy.
When seen from the perspective of commercial real estate owners and lenders, work-from-home is hardly the “win-win-win” that Mr. Bloom so blithely extols. Like the bank defaults of times past, this could turn into a losing proposition for all of us.
Mark Furman
Morristown, N.J.
The writer works in the commercial real estate industry.
