Trump Gets Telework Right: “Ridiculous”
“Ridiculous.”
So correctly pronounced President-elect Donald Trump’s assessment of all those stay-at-home office workers driven from their daily routine — and the routine of any ordinary office — by the COVID pandemic.
The Washington Times reports:
President-elect Donald Trump on Monday vowed to fire federal employees who don’t come back into the office, threatening to file a lawsuit challenging a Biden administration labor contract that cemented remote work benefits for thousands of government workers.“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Mr. Trump said at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.“And somebody in the Biden administration even gave a five-year waiver of that so that for five years, people don’t have to come back into the office,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. So it’s like a gift to the union.”
Well. Bingo.
The it-would-seem-obvious reality is that functioning society’s everyday American functions are produced by people getting up in the morning, getting cleaned up, dressed, eating breakfast — and then going to an office to work on producing whatever it is they produce.
Take a look around. Have clothes on? Without question the clothes you are wearing were produced by American workers showing up to an office of some type — perhaps a factory in this instance — to produce those clothes.
Have scrambled eggs for breakfast? A farm is an office for Americans who raise food. Chances are even the chickens are hard at work laying those eggs in the office provided by the farmer — a chicken coop.
Drive a car? Cars are not made in someone’s backyard, they are made in factories — factories that are the offices of the automakers.
Does this mean that there are not any Americans who can in fact produce product X by sitting at home tapping away on their laptop computer? Of course not.
But the changes in the working world appearing thanks to 21st-century technology are not such that everybody can simply stay at home and produce whatever product they are nominally in the business — say again “business” — of providing to earn a living.
The Times story added this, bold print for emphasis supplied:
Mr. Trump was referring to a remote work provision included in a contract negotiation between the Social Security Administration and 42,000 workers represented by the American Federation of Government Employees. That contract locked in workers’ freedom to be in the office for as little as two days a week, depending on the job.
In a classic case of not having any self-awareness, those 42,000 government employees are actually making the case that if they don’t need to be in the office to work — then they don’t need their jobs period.
In fact, they are making another point altogether. Namely, that in fact there are jobs out there that can be done without human beings at all.
Case in point? Having just returned from a trip on a state highway, I noticed yet again that the toll booths were still unmanned. Replaced by tags known as “EZ Pass” that are attached to the inside top of a car’s front window. One breezes through the once-manned toll booth — once a toll taker’s office — and the toll is collected with nary a human soul in sight.
The real problem here is that technology is changing. Automation has long been on the rise. But most things in American life are still produced by Americans reporting to an office, parking themselves in a chair or behind a computer or other machine, and spending the next eight hours or so producing product X.
And that goes in spades for federal employees.
They are still needed in their office to produce, to work with colleagues — to get the job done.
Trump, then, is decidedly right when he said this of federal employees: “If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed.”
Exactly.
The Trump era for federal government employees dawns.
READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord:
Newt Gingrich: Trump the De Facto President
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