Lindsey Weedston
LinkedIn, as well as being a place to leave your resume and work experience untouched for five years straight in order to baffle and inconvenience job recruiters, is known to be not the best place for discussions of things like labor laws and workers’ rights.
Rather, it tends to be a place where ambitious and/or upper-level management types post advice on how to take advantage of workers best and trick them into thinking that exploitation is a good thing, actually.
Evidence of this is abundant on the Reddit forum known as “Antiwork,” including a recent popular post showing a screenshot of a screen posted to LinkedIn that bashes the trend toward fully remote work largely on the grounds that it makes workers happy.
The post frets that “WFH (Work From Home)” is “breeding wrong behaviors,” by which the OP means helping workers to understand that they can indeed get all their work done without having their spirits completely crushed. It laments that the trend allows people to “take advantage” of companies by letting them do things like “See their friends and family more” and “work at their own pace.” There are also three items on the supposedly bad list pertaining to getting adequate rest.
If you were wondering, “skive off” is slang in the U.K. for skipping work or school or leaving either early, similar to “ditching” or “playing hooky” in the U.S.
The post further worries that giving workers the space to rest and enjoy their lives is going to make future generations soft, lazy, entitled, and other right-wing euphemisms for not wanting to work themselves to death for someone else’s profits.
“Is this culture creating cotton wool-wrapped people who don’t know what the real work is really like?” they ask.
To be clear, working from home is happening in the real world right now and has been in some professions since even before the internet was widely available. In fact, we can make the real world into whatever we want it to be, and mass suffering from work-related stress is not a requirement for human existence. But you wouldn’t know that if you got all your information from LinkedIn.
“Yes, flexible working is right and yes, it’s created so many more opportunities for so many people…” the OP admits, “but we need to get a balance and we need to ensure that we aren’t creating laziness and self-entitlement, without the effort and the graft that should come with it!”
At the end, the LinkedIn user reveals the real problem they have with a mass movement into remote work in spite of listing out all the reasons why it’s amazing for workers.
“So it’s essentially a lose-lose for employers,” they wrote. “We need to control this new mentality as its [sic] not sustainable and our next generations will only be worse and more entitled.”
The post makes a lot more sense if you replace the word “entitled” with “awakened to their rights as workers and human beings.” What’s really going on here is that capitalists are nervous because people are increasingly rejecting the idea that their whole lives should be about work, especially when most jobs steal huge amounts of the value of a worker’s labor to give to the CEO.
It’s no surprise that Antiwork absolutely hates it.
