Work from Home and Home Work

Contributor: Shashank 

Ram Dass shared with us - “We are all just walking each other home”. What seems to be true for coronatimes is “We are all just working (with) each other from / at home.”

One of the most important emergences of the corona-circumstances has been ‘Work from Home’. All those engaged in intellectual labour were sent packing to their homes and asked to deliver their work from home, in other words, go online. To the manual labour workers, that opportunity wasn’t available - hence unfolded the migrant worker crisis as one of the consequences. However, the focus of this article is the former. 

With the unleashing of ‘Work from Home’ - each of us employees of the industrial civilisation received our little digital burrows to keep digging. A classic manifestation is the Zoom screenshots that began to come from all over the world:

The Zoom Zoo - a wonderful caricature of our digital windows

Image Credits: SmartCX.com

A closer look

Image Credits: TheLandofBoggs

From Monday meetings to online yoga classes; from climate conferences to team feedback; from art courses to webinar on every possible topic - everything went online. Zoom, a web-conferencing service - for instance grew 30-fold in April alone. The stage has been set for the launch of 5G internet services - as per one theory human bodies became susceptible to coronavirus because 5G was being tested worldover which impacted Earth’s electro-magnetic field in turn affecting human bodies’ electromagnetic field. Therefore making it prone to viruses like covid-19. 

Coronavirus: Digitising our world

Image from Google

I heard a variety of responses to work from home. Some employees celebrated - one of my corporate friends working for an MNC put it aptly “Earlier we had to follow a long procedure to work from home, now if we need to work from office - we have to follow a long procedure!” Some others felt trapped - Another remark has been from a corporate friend- “Work from Home means more work. In the office, one could take a break, hang out with colleagues - now sitting before the screen, it's hard to do that”. Some companies celebrated too - “Why pay so much office rent, cab services etc - when you could get the work done via the internet?” Others waited for the lockdown to open for economics. 

I have been wondering how distant ‘Work from Home’ is from ‘Home Work’. For the last 300 years or so, it's been one of the pursuits of the modern industry to let all the ‘home work’ done either by family members or community members to be encroached upon by the market. 

Many daily needs were earlier met from within the home - need for cooked food, emotional care, cleaning, storing grains, babycare, celebrations, gossip (conversations), making pickles, and so on. In the last few decades, for each of these needs there is a market solution. Cooked Food - Zomato / restaurants, cleaning – househelps, UrbanClap,  emotional care - counsellors, baby-care - babysitters, day care centres, celebrations - hotels, gossip - social media and so on. There’s an important distinction - when the needs are met within home, they are called non-economic activities. And when we rely on a market solution to meet our needs - they are called economic activities. Simply put, there’s no exchange of money in the former case, so no addition to the economy. And there’s money paid and received in the latter case, hence contributing to the Gross Domestic Product of India. Hence, the effort has been to bring more and more non-economic activities to become economic activities. In the process, we became ever more busy producers of goods of modern industry and equally busy consumers. Can you notice another significant difference in the two ways of meeting our needs - from home and from the market? Yes, it's care. Care for each other and the work.

However, coronavirus put us in an interesting predicament. The importance of non-economic  home work rose back again. The burgeoning middle class of the metropolitan and other cities were suddenly required to do home work - cooking, cleaning and conversations became a daily encounter. The economy had shrunken back even if temporarily. And homes reclaimed some of their space back from the market. Since March, none of us in my family has visited a hair dressing saloon. We haven’t eaten in a restaurant except once since then. We haven’t ordered food either. We didn’t have house-help for 2.5 months. We grew part of vegetable needs in the garden behind. 

Perhaps, a few more dimensions of this phenomena needs expression. There’s the gender dimension to home work. Women around the country have taken the burden of lockdowns and us restricted to home, much more than men. Another dimension of home work is encountering the accumulated family frictions - which wouldn’t surface otherwise since people were engaged outside home and would spend very little with their families. 

Weaving back ‘Work from Home’ and ‘Home Work’ here’s the fascinating part - ‘work from home’, is an economic activity - workers are paid for it. ‘Home work’ being a non-economic activity - members are not paid for it. However, can you do without ‘work from home’ on a certain day - yes. But can you do without ‘home work’ on any day - no. What would you eat then? Hence, the abstract overvaluation of outside-home-work / economic work has fallen on its face. Now, the economy has been on a free fall - one of the reasons being the rise of home work.  It also meant the breakdown of the informal economy of domestic-helps. Suddenly in the beginning of June, governments across the world chose to save the economy over people’s lives - lockdowns were lifted in a jiffy.  

Would people who have been restricted to their homes - chose to continue to do the home work? From the megamachine perspective, its very hard. However, one can’t deny coronavirus has created an opportunity for us reorient the  relationship between the two words - ‘work’ and ‘home’ - whether work from home or home work.

So as most of us still continue to ‘work (with) each other at/from home’, what are you choosing? Are you choosing to be a part of the megamachine responding to its demands? Or are you choosing to ‘work’ your way with each other at home towards our true inner home? 

You would know that the words, ecology and economy have a common root word in Latin - ‘Oikos’ and it means home. So, ecology is the study of home. Home here can mean our houses, local neighborhood and the planet; actually home can mean our bodies as well. And economy the management of home. For far too long, we have been managing our home without studying it. Economics considers ecology a subset of the same. However, in reality ecology is far bigger than economy. In peculiar ways, coronavirus has opened a possibility to let economics and ecology re-harmonize in service of life. 

You inhabit many homes at the same time, your body, your house, your neighborhood and our planet home.

Illustration from Google

So how are you choosing to shift your relationship with ‘work’ and ‘home’ - such that you can enable the relationship between ecology and economics to transform?