Saturday 12 September 2020
The Oil in the Wheels of Commerce
Before the Government went frantic over the late upsurge in coronavirus cases in the UK we were all being strongly encouraged to 'get back to work', a curious phrase as it suggested that nobody had been working over previous months. Some newspapers seemed to believe that this was indeed the case - that the nation had been on an extended holiday, and that workers not returning to offices were skiving, getting away with something that hard-working, diligent journalists were not. As far as the millions on furlough were concerned, the fact that they were not working was not their choice, but those of the businesses that employed them. It would have been better for the Government to term its request - demand? - that we all return to the workplace, not to work itself. Of course workers have shown a great reluctance to do so, partly because they don't feel safe travelling long distances to work in cities in the way they once did, and partly because they really don't need to and the experience of working in the old way was so horrible that they really don't want to go back to it. This is a generalisation, but even the people I've spoken to who have been very much looking forward to escaping from their homes now and again don't want to return to doing it all day, every day. They want a more varied life, having glimpsed its possibility.
Which is why the Government's anxiety that everyone start commuting again to city centres which have for decades been dead once all the office workers go home is weird. The insistence that millions of souls return to office spaces for the sake of the very infrastructure - transport, food, ancillary services - that only exists in order to support that model of work is a bit like demanding that we start using stagecoaches again in order to provide trade for the inns in market towns. There is an ambiguity in all this: workers who are capable of working from home abandon the cities, putting out of work on average poorer workers who staff the coffee shops and sandwich bars and dry-cleaners that service them, not to mention the low-paid cleaners and security guards who look after the offices where they work. But you can't buck the market. Having worked for twelve years in museums, I'm used to and supportive of the idea that the public, through their elected representatives, might find it worthwhile to subsidise enterprises which might not easily be able to pay their way commercially. But, if you're not going to do that, if you're not going to decide that this or that facility expresses a social aspiration that's worth funding publicly, then you have to let things take their course. That's the other way we determine worth socially: whether people want something enough to pay for it, whether it fulfils a need that they'll fork out for. You either do the one, or the other. But expecting people to do something they don't want to do just to prop up enterprises that exist in order to facilitate that unwanted thing (in this case, a model of work that involves extensive daily commuting) is really, really irrational.
What strange times we live in, in which the Right expects society to prop up businesses we discover we no longer really need, while the Left declares 'No! The market must prevail!' Anyone would think that the Government and its allies have some ulterior concern than simply the welfare of the baristas and cleaners who will be unemployed by the reduction in the carcinogenic model of working we've become used to: maybe the rentiers who have creamed off value from all those city-centre offices (though make no mistake: some of those rentiers will be pension funds that, very possibly, you and I benefit from).
Not all coffee shops are equal. The ones in Swanvale Halt facilitate community: those in the streets of central London which service the offices around them, I'm afraid, exist as a result of a system which dismantles community. They represent a desperate effort on the part of human beings to preserve something of what they are. The problem with revolutions is that, along with unjust orders, they also wipe away all the ways we find to make those orders bearable. Home workers will end up being exploited in new ways, but will find methods of coping: perhaps by popping out in the day to the new coffee shops which might, just, spring up where they live, and now work as well.
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