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Remote Work Is Deeply Inequitable [1]

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Date: 2025-05-30

I know I will get down voted into oblivion by the remote work lovers, but I think this is important to say. I have come to the conclusion that remote work is deeply inequitable. Do you have a four bedroom place with a smaller bedroom that can be converted into a den/office? Potentially, you can be effective working remotely. And really that is a pretty big maybe.

But effective telework assumes that your at-home situation is stable and not abusive. Have a spouse who is an alcoholic and unemployed, you might spend your days nervous that they'll walk in on a meeting and be less productive as a result.

Live in a small apartment and have kids? Even if you're not actually watching kids, background noise can distract you and impede your performance.

And that doesn't count people who clandestinely work from abroad and try to turn weekends away into weeks or months away. I have now run into that at multiple employers. It's always fun when that person is a manager and it takes months for an urgent email to be responded to. It gives you the choice of going around that person to the next level and incurring their wrath by ending their years long scam, or not saying anything and eventually being blamed when something doesn't get done. Hello toxic workplaces.

Even worse, on all remote teams if you're picking up the slack for team members with less than ideal working conditions or who rarely work while clocking in from Aruba, it's probably never seen. The promotions? They almost always go to people who were known from the pre-remote days, even if they're the ones who pretend to work while really vacationing. Why? Because you can't build effective relationships on Zoom.

Remote work is as popular as it is because it became a solution to a child care crisis that was festering before COVID and that became a full blown crisis during COVID. Good, safe childcare often costs two to three times the take-home pay of an entry-level job. Republicans have starved subsidized childcare programs by not increasing the minimum wage since the '00s (unions that focused on increasing minimum wages in the States and not at the federal level are also partially to blame for this, looking at you SEIU--note: I am a former SEIU member). Simply put, the federal poverty level--eligibility for subsidized childcare is based on multiples of the federal poverty level--is so low that entry level workers in New York, Seattle or San Francisco or Los Angeles cannot possibly qualify for subsidized childcare.

Want to afford a place to live in New York, Seattle or San Francisco? Unless your spouse is making a quarter million or more, you need a two income household due to rent and housing prices. Republicans are starving childcare because they're obsessed with bringing back the mythical 1950s where single income households were the norm and women generally stayed home. They forget that this was made possible by the GI bill, massive federal spending and a tax rate on the highest income earners that was over double today's rate.

So when COVID happened and remote work became more widely adopted it did two things: it enabled people who were scraping by in substandard, smaller housing in urban cores to move to distant suburbs, closeish exurbs and even rural communities. Because childcare wasn't open, it became acceptable to work while children attended school remotely.

I am not saying that remote work isn't a good thing in all circumstances. Have a kid with the flu? Remote work can help you avoid taking sick leave and do work while they nap.

But I am saying that I've seen enough of the so-called remote work vacations to be really tired of it. And I think there needs to be a cultural reckoning about what responsible remote work is.

Part of that needs to be honest conversations about burn out and how to manage it. There needs to be a conversation about what PTO really is and how it's OK to unplug. Frankly, the worst part about people (especially managers) who remote work from vacation spots and cruise ships, is that they create the expectation in their team that it isn't OK to unplug when taking leave (even if they're not actually working while clocked in).

Anyway, remote work is often poorly managed in my field, and I've seen it ruin multiple teams cohesion. This is pretty much guaranteed to happen when management is the one working from thousands of miles away in some vacation spot.

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