program could delight a wife whose husband holds a steady job with
good health insurance and other benefits. On the other hand, the
arrangement could be bad news for a worker depending on the
telecommuting for his or her main income. Significantly, women head
most single-parent households.
4. The keyers may not be sharing the experiment’s rewards fifty-fifty.
Excluding minor administrative expenses, the telecommuters’ services
cost the firm $47.40 a day on the average, minus whatever profit the
company may make off the terminals it rents to the workers. Let’s say
the final expense is $45. By contrast, the regular workers cost at
least $50.52 a day if you include vacation, fringe benefits, and the
$5.30 that the firm pays for a terminal lease. Missing, however, are
the expenses of office space. Also, the company’s getting slightly
more work from the telecommuters with only about 12 percent as many
errors!
Could an antitelecommuting backlash develop as workers catch on to the
economics?
Already the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations and the Services Employees International Union have
proposed the outlawing of computer homework. Given the political climate
of the mid-1980s, that seemed unlikely. This could change, however. Gil
Gordon, an ex-Johnson and Johnson personnel man turned telecommuting
consultant, correctly warns against using telecommuting to bargain down
workers’ pay or bust up organizing drives.
“There’s nothing new about shift work, piecework, which is what pay per
line of information is,” says Karen Nussbaum, president of 9 to 5, the
National Association of Working Women. “Or pay by keystroke homework.
That’s a step back into the Middle Ages, if you ask me, and into the
cottage industries.”[62]
Footnote 62:
The Nussbaum quotes are from “9 to 5 President Raps Office Automation,
Says It Deskills, Devalues Office Jobs,” _Computerworld_, May 3, 1982,
p. 53.
A difference exists, after all, between creative jobs, like Hewes’s, and
those that, in any setting, will be drudge work. The question is Where
will the typing, the data entry, the other labor, be more palatable—home
or normal office? And ideally that’s a worker-by-worker,
company-by-company, decision. Perhaps some workers will eventually
strike for the _right_ to telecommute. In fact, Glenn E. Watts,
president of the Communications Workers of America, while frowning on
electronic scabbing, once said that telecommuters might even plug into
union gatherings. Union opposition to telecommuting could very well
change. The big variable is whether companies will follow Gil Gordon’s
wise advice not to use telecommuting as a union-busting ploy.
Of course, presently, home work isn’t for all. Today a telecommuter
can’t make steel, cars, or refrigerators by remote control. He or she
can’t cook a Big Mac, sweep a floor, run a supermarket checkout, or load
a truck; for telecommuting is now strictly the province of white-collar
workers and professionals. Indeed, companies in predominantly
blue-collar fields may decide that certain office jobs just defy wiring
in. Suppose an auto worker suffers a series of late paychecks. Will a
payroll clerk sitting in a comfortable suburban home be as responsive as
he might be dealing with the man face-to-face?
Even in basically white-collar fields, some bosses and employers may
look askance at universal telecommuting.
Some, for instance, may miss the hints of body language, the blink of an
eye, the tapping feet, the little, subtle signs that many people feel to
“read” friend and foe. Others simply miss _seeing_ people hard at work.
A Seattle hospital administrator, a telecommuter supervising two others
working at home, says: “It ultimately comes down to an honor
system.”[63]
Footnote 63:
The Seattle example is from _Business Week_, May 3, 1982, p. 66.
So if you don’t trust your underlings and can’t objectively measure
their output, you’d better keep your workers at the office and watch for
eye blinks.
Not that every employee will want to telecommute, anyway. Management
Recruiters International, Inc. asked six thousand people if they’d be
willing to telecommute several days a week. Only 36 percent said they
would. That’s still an impressive percentage, and it will grow as more
people appreciate telecommuting’s virtues and it becomes more socially
acceptable, but there’ll always be skeptics like Jack Smith.[64]
Footnote 64:
_USA Today_, March 28, 1984, p. 3B, reported Management Recruiters’
telecommuting survey.
He’s a columnist with the _Los Angeles Times_, which once freed him of
his commute. After six weeks, however, his granddaughter broke his
typewriter, and he temporarily returned to the newspaper, where he
rediscovered the joys of face-to-face contact and decided to remain. His
columns perked up. He had missed “the friendly faces, fresh in the
morning; the clothes; the gossip; the flirtations; the benign
conspiracies; lunch-hour expeditions; the open forums on war and peace,
Reaganomics, and the Rams quarterback controversy, none of which could
be examined with such reckless spontaneity by anything canned for
consumption on your home computer.”
“He realized that he really came back to the office not just to write
but to renew his interaction with human life,” says William Renfro, a
Washington consultant.[65]
Footnote 65:
William Renfro’s comments appeared in _The Futurist_, June 1982.
Then again, Maxine Messinger, a gossip columnist with the Houston
_Chronicle_, writes happily on a computer at home and brags that she
hasn’t been to the office in years.
“For a long time it’s been far more efficient for me to work at home,”
says another confirmed telecommuter, Hollis Vail, a part-time management
consultant with the U.S. Geological Survey.
“I use my computer for writing, reports, and sending reports and
messages,” he says, “and I can get all the data I want from the system.”
The U.S. Geological Survey has thousands of people using electronic
mail, and Vail can even hold conferences over the wire and record the
results on his computer disks. Then he can sum them up. In fact, he can
electronically cut and paste to produce policy documents reflecting many
viewpoints.
David Snyder, now a professional futurist and consultant, fondly
remembers the computerized conferences of his days as an Internal
Revenue Service official. “I wrote a book with eight other people,” he
says, “and we didn’t meet until it was written. It was a much better
product because we could work that way. The travel would have been too
expensive. And the mails would have been too much of a delay.” The
coauthors left their contributions in each other’s electronic mailboxes
for perusal and change. Back then Snyder was on a government computer,
but later he hooked up an Apple in his Maryland home; he was planning to
connect with aunts, uncles, and other members of his extended family,
nationwide, who, together, do consulting and produce films. “You can’t
have a mom-and-pop steel mill,” he said. “You can have a mom-and-pop
information factory.”
Rank Xerox, the office equipment giant’s joint venture in England, is
helping to pave the way for Mom and Pop.
It’s letting managers and other professionals telecommute. They’re no
longer salaried, and they give up pensions and perks like company cars;
but the “networkers,” as they’re called, normally sign two-year
contracts guaranteeing them work at least two days a week. Business with
other companies may take up the remaining days. In a sense the Rank
Xerox program could be a large corporation’s version of the
hundred-hour-a-month arrangement that Jeremy Hewes worked out with the
computer magazine.
“Clearly,” says Derek Hornby, staff support director and a member of the
Rank Xerox policy committee, “we need and will always have a ‘core’
staff within the head office for day-to-day management. Many functions,
however, can be fulfilled by networkers.”[66]
Footnote 66:
The Xerox example comes from correspondence, interviews, and the
_Financial Times_, London, July 20, 1982.
Computer work, pension advising, management training, even putting out
the company newsletter, are some of the tasks with which the networkers
may help core staffers. Who qualifies for the program? Someone the
company wants to keep but whose services it needs only part time. The
first networker, Roger Walker, a former personnel manager in his late
thirties, helped cut costs in the most direct way, eliminating his job.
He was planning, anyway, to venture out on his own. But the Rank Xerox
program eased the transition.
“What do you answer,” I asked the company, “when people say, ‘Isn’t this
really just an outplacement scheme?’”
“The rough cost of someone going networking,” said Phil Judkins, a Rank
Xerox spokesman in London, “is approximately three times the cost of
their compensation if they were simply declared redundant by Rank
Xerox.”
More than a year into the program, how were the volunteers doing?
“Extremely well,” said Judkins—all of them. He said two networkers
seemed “well on the way to one-million-dollar turnover companies.”
And Rank Xerox, needless to say, didn’t supply all that business.
Along the way the corporation was benefiting from the useful business
contacts that the new entrepreneurs were making outside the company.
Sensibly, it discounted its model 820 microcomputer for the networkers.
They could not only do their normal work but help show off a company
product.
Runaway expenses, though, especially rent, were the real spur behind the
experiment.
The rent on Rank Xerox’s international headquarters, in London, had
doubled in just two years. Small wonder, then, that Rank Xerox wanted to
trim every speck of gristle from its headquarters budget. And by late
1983 the knife seemed to be slicing well. The forty-three networkers
were helping Rank Xerox save a third of a million dollars a year in
office space. Judkins said: “We have rid our books of this sterile
expense.”
In the United States, Mike Bell, Xerox real estate executive, is busy
toting up the advantages of another form of telecommuting—moving some
corporate operations out of expensive downtown areas.
“Why should a company have row after row of workers taking up desk space
in back rooms in large cities,” he says, “when it could modernize its
office machinery and farm them out to offices in the suburbs? An average
office worker and his desk take up 200 square feet at $20 a foot in big
cities. That’s $4,000 a year just for rent. Suppose you could move him
to a suburb with rent at $12 a square foot. Then rent would be only
$2,400 a year.”
If the employee was in a suburban office tied in to headquarters via a
computer-telephone hook-up, you might save as much as $3,000 over five
years—even if you counted expenses like equipment costs.[67]
Footnote 67:
Thanks to Mike Bell for helping me obtain figures comparing
telecommuting costs to alternatives. And the editor has simplified the
numbers presented.
And you might save $8,200 per employee over a five year period if the
workers were at home.
The chart below assumes that (1) each employee takes up 200 square feet,
including corridor, aisle, and file space, (2) the downtown rent is $20
a square foot, which is perhaps half of some Manhattan rents, (3) the
suburban rent is $12 a square foot, (4) you pay home workers $4 a square
foot in rent, (5) your investment in equipment for each telecommuter is
$4,000, (6) the effective tax rate is 35 percent, (7) you’ll receive a
tax credit of ten percent of the computer gear’s initial cost and (8)
depreciation is straight line over five years. Yes, $4,000 is more than
the computers might each cost; the inflated figure helps fudge for
miscellaneous expenses like moving expenses and phone bills. As for tax
laws, they can change. But the credit—as distinguished from
depreciation—accounts for only a tiny fraction of the money you’re
saving. One last point: the chart below doesn’t consider interest on
what you’d be saving in rent.
Large companies, of course, could mix different forms of telecommuting
and employment arrangements. They might even let some workers shift back
and forth. Some employees, some of the time, anyway, would work at home,
while others might be at companies’ regional or neighborhood
telecommuting centers of one kind or another.
Jack Nilles’s kind of neighborhood center—at least one of the kinds he’s
proposed—would be organized by corporate function. One center would
bring all the accountants together, for instance,
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
A COMPARISON OF OFFICE EXPENSES PER WORKER
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
CASE 1: DOWNTOWN OFFICE
_Years_ _0_ _1_ _2_ _3_ _4_ _5_ _Total_
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Rent 0 4,000 4,000 4,000 4,000 4,000 20,000
Tax Reduction at 0 -1,400 -1,400 -1,400 -1,400 -1,400 -7,000
35% Rate
Total Expenses 0 2,600 2,600 2,600 2,600 2,600 =13,000=
CASE 2: SUBURBAN OFFICE
_Years_ _0_ _1_ _2_ _3_ _4_ _5_ _Total_
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Rent 0 2,400 2,400 2,400 2,400 2,400 12,000
Tax Reduction at 0 -840 -840 -840 -840 -840 -4,200
35% Rate
Investment 4,000 0 0 0 0 0 4,000
Tax Credit -400 0 0 0 0 0 -400
Depreciation 0 -280 -280 -280 -280 -280 -1,400
Credit
Total Expenses 3,600 1,280 1,280 1,280 1,280 1,280 =10,000=
CASE 3: HOME OFFICE
_Years_ _0_ _1_ _2_ _3_ _4_ _5_ _Total_
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Rent 0 800 800 800 800 800 4,000
Tax Reduction at 0 -280 -280 -280 -280 -280 -1,400
35% Rate
Investment 4,000 0 0 0 0 0 4,000
Tax Credit -400 0 0 0 0 0 -400
Depreciation 0 -280 -280 -280 -280 -280 -1,400
Credit
Total Expenses 3,600 240 240 240 240 240 =4,800=
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
and another would house a company’s public relations department. This
idea does have the important advantage of, say, letting accountants pore
over their electronic ledgers in each other’s company. Yet what about
the unlucky ones who lived in suburbs across town?[68]
Footnote 68:
Nilles may have been the first to envision neighborhood centers for
telecommuters.
They would prefer, presumably, the kind of center propounded by Richard
C. Harkness, a former professor at the University of Washington who
later joined Satellite Business Systems.
Under the Harkness plan, an employee would go to the center closest to
his home. “He might even walk there,” Harkness says. According to him, a
large company might have as many neighborhood centers as elementary
schools—leasing offices for individual workers or small groups. Imagine
a professional building with a real estate agency next to a stockbroker,
a doctor across the hall from a commodities trader. Well, that’s how it
would be in a building housing neighborhood centers, except a sign
outside a suite might say “General Motors” rather than “Dr. Pearlman.”
Of course a company might instead have fewer centers and lease whole
floors. Stepping off the elevator, you’d see the foot-high letters
reminding you you were in GM territory. Workers would benefit from the
companionship of perhaps several dozen colleagues, quick access to
secretarial and copying services, and similar support.
“My way is more radical than locating people by jobs,” says Harkness,
“since an accountant could be in one place and his boss in another.”
Computer networks would maintain entire organizations; a whole new
branch of management science would develop to hone procedures to manage
telecommuters. Perhaps the day will come when IBM will endow Harvard
Business School with a telecommuting chair.
A third form of neighborhood center would be a munytel, as I’ll call
it—a municipally or privately run center with terminals capable of
linking up with many companies’ equipment. Individual employees, not
companies, might rent munytel offices.
Munytels would not bolster employees’ corporate loyalties; but some
companies wouldn’t care, favoring other ways.[69]
Footnote 69:
The 1977 Stanford study discusses the neighborhood-center concept in
depth and describes a number of possibilities, many of them
overlapping with my “munytel” idea. The term “munytel” is mine.
Munytels, moreover, could be ideal for free-lance telecommuters who
valued a clear line between home and office. Workers would be at these
neighborhood centers all the time or whenever they preferred and space
was available. Fed up temporarily with toiling alongside a sullen spouse
at home? Then you’d flee to a munytel, unless your free-lance work
involved confidential company information; in which case you might drive
to a GM or Prudential suite with a spare terminal.
Neighbors with similar or complementary skills might gather at munytels
and pool resources to seek contracts from large companies. Why not use
computerized lists to bring together people in the first place?
“Neighborhood work centers could themselves become employers, selling
clerical or professional services to other organizations,” said one of
the consultants working with Harkness on a landmark telecommuting study
for the Stanford Research Institute in the late 1970s.
Munytels, in addition, could be drop-off points for messengers from
corporations’ headquarters. They would deliver printed material—books,
for instance—that companies couldn’t flash across the screens of
telecommuters at home and munytels.
Also, and perhaps just as important, munytels could serve as informal
neighborhood clubs.
They could offer food and drink and a chance to mix electronically
transmitted gossip with the face-to-face kind. “Meet me,” a stock
suggestion might go, “at the munytel.”
Moreover, for telecommuters unable to handle their children and jobs
simultaneously, the munytels might provide child care. And in poor
neighborhoods, the munytels could combine work facilities with training.
The prefiasco Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago, despite its bad luck
with “problem loans,” did some enlightened work in this field. It
experimented with a word-processing center twenty-five miles away at a
community college. The bank used it for both training and actual bank
work, a logical combination; the students have learned on equipment
similar to what they would use on the job, not simply the obsolete
machinery that many schools must skimp along with. Corporations,
encouraged by tax breaks or government subsidies, might together
establish munytels in poorer neighborhoods.[70] They would provide the
businesslike surroundings that some workers might prefer over home
offices in slums or public housing projects.
Footnote 70:
Elizabeth Carlson of Continental Illinois said the community college
had ended the experiment after buying its own equipment. But the bank
feels the arrangement was successful. In fact, it set up a satellite
word-processing center in a shopping center near the college.
Munytels would be _one_ response to some thoughtful criticisms of
telecommuting made by Janice C. Blood, 9 to 5’s information director.
“If you’re a secretary earning $11,000 a year,” she says, “will your
employer build you an addition for your computer room? Even a small
Apple wouldn’t be too attractive an addition to my living room.”
Blood is also worried about the cost of the equipment itself, asking,
“Should someone get a cut in salary just because her boss gets [her] a
new typewriter?”
More likely, however, clerical workers instead would receive _some_ more
money for turning out a lot more work. Whatever the case, munytels could
be a solution to the equipment issue—in addition to the obvious one of
company-supplied computers in various cases.
But workers should still be free to use their own terminals. Remember
Hollis Vail’s preference for _his_ printer?
He’s right. I could never stomach working all day on, say, one of the
older Apple IIs, which some companies may still use as their universal
microcomputer. My Kaypro’s keyboard has a silkier feel. The screen is
more viewable than many Apple monitors, and I’m a confirmed WordStar
addict. Even if voice commands become the norm, I may well be among the
last of the keyboard diehards. And yet, were I telecommuting, it
wouldn’t matter. A corporate computer would care about the right series
and speeds of bytes, not how they originated. So I might be able to keep
using my electronic equivalent of a buggy whip.
Just about anybody, moreover, will be able to afford a _useful_ small
computer before the end of the century—because sooner or later one will
be cheaper than today’s typical TV sets. Flat screens and keyboards will
sell for a pittance as mass production and robotics drive down costs. So
much for that one of Blood’s arguments.
As for her fear of an Apple system cluttering up her living room—well,
the home computer of tomorrow will probably be smaller and better
looking. Or it’ll be part of your TV. If not? You may hide your
equipment in a handsome, wooden cabinet that will convert to a genuinely
ergonomic table of adjustable height. No, I don’t know of a product like
that now. But already stores in trendy Yuppie areas are springing up
with names like “Computer Support,” and some of their offerings may be
as fit for your living room as for your office.
Less easily answered, however, is Blood’s worry of “a Mae West
employment profile”—broad at the top, narrow at the middle, wide at the
bottom. That is, there might be lush job opportunities near the top
around the equivalent of Mae’s bust. A few senior managers could
electronically monitor the masses toiling at home—could count and time
their keystrokes.
But between the top people and the ones entering the data, companies
would need many fewer run-of-the-mill supervisors.
And that would pinch off some promotion opportunities for the clerical
workers.
In some ways, however, companies might make nonsupervisory work more
palatable. They might, for instance, pay clerks not by individuals’
keystrokes but by those of small “telegroups,” where peer pressure would
keep every member productive.
Also, companies might follow the example of Volvo, the Swedish
automaker, and rotate some workers’ tasks. Some numbers crunchers might
swap assignments with word-processing people. Indeed, companies could
pay extra for versatility. Word-processing work today is sometimes more
complicated than regular typing; but that might not always be so, and
corporations could relieve some of the boredom of repetitious jobs
simply by letting employees exchange them.
Still another legitimate worry is the distribution of the economic
benefits of telecommuting. What’s to prevent employers from abuse of the
piecework payment system if the government lets it become the norm?
Could piecework be just a gimmick to help impersonally squeeze the last
drop of blood from the clerical telecommuters? Is telecommuting a
mean-spirited or enlightened response to the day-care problem? I suspect
some companies _are_ mean spirited. Not all. But some. Ideally, however,
this won’t deprive society of telecommuting’s benefits. Munytels, after
all, could help solve the child-care problem, and changes in the labor
laws could guarantee the fairness of the piecework system for all.
Existing ones do cover clerks doing piecework. They must, for instance,
keep time records to show they’re collecting the equivalent of the
minimum wage.