Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average &#x27;working&#x27; hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly.<p>The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now &#x27;required&#x27; for many.<p>I personally feel that the relative recent introduction of &#x27;work from anywhere&#x27; technology for the knowledge worker class, has indeed lead to yet another expansion of salaried-time, even when no &#x27;salary&#x27; is provided for it.<p>We should also ask ourselves if the stance on &#x27;working-from-home&#x27;, which should be a normal evolution of the technology, hasn&#x27;t been hampered by a standing tradition of externalizing the costs of commuting by companies to employees.<p>Commuting in itself is for many parts an anachronism that lost its grounding with the introduction of personal computers and the internet. It should be seriously questioned why this is allowed to stand, when it comes at great costs to both the employee&#x27;s health as well as the environment.<p>(P.S. Before you go &#x27;but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together&#x27;, you can be right, but do we need the &#x27;gold-standard&#x27; of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year?<p>As in many things it is a trade off. Yet often, we see that in those trade-offs were companies are left holding the bill instead of the employee (office furniture and architecture, IT equipment, ...), the balance goes in the direction of &#x27;good-enough&#x27; rather than the &#x27;best-of-the-best&#x27;.)