The Founders Want You to Work From Home: THE CEOS WHO WOULD HERD US BACK TO THE OFFICE ARE FLOUTING A TRADITION OF ECONOMIC AUTONOMY AND PRODUCTIVE LEISURE THAT STRETCHES BACK TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

• Author: Wolfe, Rob

During the darkest depths of the pandemic, as businesses laid off millions of people and refrigerator trucks idled outside hospitals, one segment of the workforce enjoyed a degree of freedom and autonomy not seen in at least a century. With offices closed, the "laptop class" of knowledge workers was forced--or freed--to phone it in from home. At first, we (I am a member of this tribe) languished, doom-scrolling Twitter and streaming episodes of Tiger King. But then a funny thing happened. Without a boss looming over our shoulders, we were given an unprecedented amount of control over our own schedules. Many of us avoided hours-long commutes, as well. And in that extra time, amid enormous suffering and upheaval, occurred a curious flourishing. We baked bread. We learned to knit. We video-chatted with friends we'd never have thought to reach out to in normal times. We tended our gardens, botanical and spiritual alike.

Working from home lifted burdens we didn't know we carried. Implicit in office life is a degree of power and control--not only do the bosses buy our services, they also buy our physical presence. Decoupling those things unlocked liberty not seen in any office worker's lifetime; managers were forced to communicate precisely what they wanted from their employees, rather than just keep them around for incidental productivity--or, as Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, put it, "spontaneous idea generation."

The change in physical terrain--from a space controlled by the boss to the sanctuary of one's own home--might seem minor, a matter of personal convenience, but it speaks to societal forces that reach deep into American history. In the Revolutionary Era, founders like Thomas Jefferson feared, more than almost anything else, industrialization and the rise of wage labor. When independent farmers left their homes to toil in factories under the watchful eye of a boss, their fates--and their votes--became yoked to their industrialist masters, Jefferson believed. They lost their independence as citizens as well as workers. To Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and others, the yeoman farmer was the ideal citizen who set his own schedule and was beholden to no one. With a little suspension of disbelief, one could imagine the darkest days of 2020 as a time machine transporting knowledge workers back to their freehold farms. There, we tended our intellectual crops at our leisure, reviving a model of work long forgotten. We discovered we liked it.

Now, the Man wants to take it all away. A steady drumbeat of CEO voices is calling for a return to the office, where white-collar workers will allegedly be more productive--and more easily surveilled. Steven Rattner, who manages Michael Bloomberg's $8 billion personal investment fund, summed up the anxiety of the ownership class in a New York Times op-ed: "Has America gone soft?" In his piece, Rattner briefly acknowledges that many Americans may no longer value the economic incentives of constant toil over the prospect of a less productive, but more leisurely, existence. But he warns that, while we rest, the Chinese are working 72-hour weeks, and that "less output ... eventually means a lower standard of living (or a less quickly rising one)." But his assumption--that working from home equals less productivity--is far from an established fact. Yes, some people are using their extra time to play video games. Others, however, are using their freedom to work harder and more efficiently, sending Slack messages in the doctor's waiting room and folding laundry while answering calls. Besides, what was the "standard of living" that we strove for all those years--having more stuff? Could there, perhaps, exist collective goods other than the wealth we generate for our bosses? It doesn't matter; for Rattner and his billionaire friends, the one measurable good to be observed in a worker is how much they produce.

That the laptop class can even have this debate reflects a privilege not shared by service workers, who during the pandemic suffered through layoffs, workplace outbreaks, and rudeness and violence from customers. Still, the struggles of taxi drivers and restaurant waiters are like those of knowledge workers in kind, if not degree. What the average working person lacks, from baristas to mechanics to salespeople to journalists, is economic agency. Economic agency moves hand in hand with political power, and when great swaths of people are denied those things for too long, republics crumble.

Much ink has been spilled on the post-pandemic future of work, but little of it has addressed the civic underpinnings of the debate. Some, like Rattner, seem eager to herd us back into our cubicles, with little change to underlying socioeconomic arrangements. Other, more conciliatory, commentators note that more leisure time can improve productivity. Still others chide the marketplace for treating leisure as a "productivity hack" rather than a good in itself. This is closer, but it still misses why the discussion matters to everyone, and not just to whichever class of worker is demanding better treatment.

The debate is about more than greedy bosses and fed-up workers; it's about democracy's foundations. An intellectual lineage stretching back to ancient Greece argues that self-governing societies need independent, well-informed, and civically engaged citizens to survive. And to build those people up, societies must give them two things: economic autonomy and leisure...