And that social change has probably contributed to the economic change. If a two income household can outbid a single income household when it comes to housing costs then the sort of ever-rising house prices we have become all too accustomed in 2 or 3 generations is no surprise.
When I bought my flat a quarter of a century all my neighbours were, as myself, singles buying on a mortgage. Now half are rented by couples and sharers.
When I bought my first house in 1969 wife's earning were ignored and max mortgage was STRICTLY 3 x earnings and 80% of purchase price. To get a mortgage you had to join the queue and you couldn't even get in the queue unless you had a savings record.
Same here - in the early '70s. And not all building societies would lend on a house this old - it's Victorian and 1885. Luckily found a London one which would.
Interesting point was the house was valued at less than the rebuilding costs. So had to pay insurance based on the latter higher figure. That's been index linked ever since, and they now sell for 3 times today's rebuilding cost...
Sure - and *for you* it might work out OK. The problem facing employers is that as soon as they permit one employee to work from home, they are pretty much obliged to allow other employees to do the same.
It is an unfortunate fact that whilst some people (and you may be one of them) are able to discipline themselves to do the same amount of work at home as they do in the office, the majority of people will not do anything like the same amount of work unless it is something that can be monitored pretty much continuously. Distractions abound, and the temptation to indulge in other things whilst out of sight of anyone else is great - and while they may promise themselves that they will make up the time they just took off to watch a TV program or do a bit of wallpapering or pop down the shops - it never seems to happen.
And I'm afraid that your type of work is a type that it is difficult to monitor just how much time you really *did* spend on it, because one specification may take you 5 hours to write, whilst another might take you 8 hours even though they are of similar size.
In order to allow working from home for most jobs, it is necessary for an employer to pay in accordance with actual work done rather than a fixed salary - and that change leads to all sorts of problems for both employer and employee. The biggest issue is that the only way to measure "work done" in many cases is to look at "results achieved". Which is tough luck on the salesman working from home who has spent a solid 8 hours a day all week following up leads that didn't result in a single sale, or on yourself who has spent a week writing a particularly difficult specification that gets paid the same as a spec that you can knock out in a day.
It works because it is self-monitoring. Some jobs are like that. For the majority of jobs however, the temptation to skive off work when there is nobody around to see what you are doing will prove too great for the majority of people, no matter how well-intentioned they set out.
If needs must, you would have had to live separately most of the time and see each other only on occassion. It's what many people have to do - oil rig workers, soldiers etc.
The difficulty when the support system is based on government edict is in separating those who are genuinely in need from those who are not.
*You* may have had no reasonable options, but other people may well take a government handout when there are other solutions open to them. Sure, every applicant could be vetted - but that in itself takes a great deal of time and manpower (=money), and there is still no guarantee that people are not playing the system.I would love to be able to support all the unfortunate people in the World. But I do not have the resources to do so, and so my charity is focussed on the people I know rather than millions of complete strangers.
In fact, government support is what *stops* people helping their family and neighbours in many cases. Why should I help the struggling single mother next door when the government is already taxing me to destitution in order to provide all the help they tell me she needs?
I have noticed that countries that do not have such a benefits system have communities that are closer and less anti-social than countries in which the government is supposed to supply all the help anyone falling on hard times needs.
As said, it is difficult to differentiate between the two - unless the people you are helping are known to you personally so that you can make a continuous assessment as to whether they are really in need or whether they are taking advantage of your generosity.
Um, no. Not even slightly. I work from home, a couple of other colleagues do, the rest aren't allowed to.
People have found the opposite in many cases - the work/life boundary gets blurred the other way round, and many people working at home put in rather more time than they would at the office.
No. Experience says that doesn't need to happen. Performance is measured in the same way as for a normal office worker, and apparent underperformance dealt with in the same way.
Your premise is wrong, therefore your deduction is wrong too.
And what if he collars the wrong person in the same way that the thief collared the wrong tools? By the time he got down from the roof, the person he saw may be far away, but another youth who looks similar is seen and mistaken for the perpetrator.
So if a person has no right to take goods that he thinks were stolen from him, surely he also has no right to beat up a person who he thinks he saw take them?
I read an amusing article today about a policeman who was chasing himself. A CCTV operator had originally mistaken the plainclothes policeman for a "person acting suspiciously". That info had been passed to the policeman himself, who then attempted to find and catch the suspicious individual by following information received from the CCTV operator who was tracking the suspect. Eventually it was realised what was happening and everyone had a laugh. But I immediately thought to myself, what if an innocent person had happened to walk into the area? The probability woul dbe that the innocent person would be mistaken for the suspect, and an unpleasant time for the innocent person would follow.
My 1st house cost £3400, my 1st caravan cost £3600. How's that for inflation!!
Lol! Aside from the fact that domestic duties are not nearly as onerous as they once were, what advantages do you see in this system?
It is possible from a purely economic point of view - our society is more than rich enough.
Indeed, you cannot be morally obligated to do what you cannot do, although it is worth remembering that conditions in the third world have often been aggravated by our own (i.e. the 'first world's') actions, and are not just an inevitable product of nature.
But realistically, that is likely to mean the elderly being moved to a place away from their families, communities, and culture. The fact that you could suggest the idea as being a "pragmatic" solution to the problem, fails to appreciate that part of the problem with 'care' is that is has a psychological component that is quite distinct from catering to biological needs.
Realistically, we could hook the elderly up to a machine, by inserting a feeding tube and urethral and rectal catheters, with an overhead nozzle providing occasional showers of soapy water and disinfectant, and on the face of it this would be high-quality and effficient biological care, and yet there seems to be something missing...
Indeed, but potentially that means more radical and fundamental reorganisations of society.
It's because you gain more autonomy by working from home, and if you have autonomy then you need to be trusted (rather than simply monitored). A relationship of trust is always more efficient as a whole, but for a profit-making enterprise determined to exploit you and determined to survive in a competitive market, it does not matter if the operation is 99% inefficient with your labour and theirs, so long as that 1% of labour generates profits for them and gives them a good standard of living by comparison to those they exploit.
O would some power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us.
A class of people who exist more in the imagination than in reality.
The distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, is always a pretense to allow a person to claim that they actually have some care or charity for others, whilst in fact shirking the obligation. It's quite clear that you think "society owes" care pretty much to just to yourself and those closest to you (whose adverse circumstances happen to include age, illness, and infirmity).
It is not even clear that the concern for those closest to you is purely altruistic, but rather a desire to shirk the responsibility for care that will otherwise fall on you to provide (either by supplying your time and labour, or by supplying money from your earned income).
Both trust and exploitation are 2-way streets.
Otherwise what you say is correct - working from home is possible only if there is respect and trust *on both sides*. As your posts indicate that you could never trust your employer, it would probably not be a good thing to allow you to work from home.
If an employee feels as you do, that they are being exploited by their employer, then it is pretty obvious that they will do all they can get away with to redress the balance (as they see it). So if, for example, you feel that you are not being paid enough, then you'll probably respond by working fewer hours so that your hourly rate increases to the point that you believe is more fair.
or doing something faaaaaaaar more beneficial like get another better job ;-)
Mike
The main advantage is that the children will be fully cared for by a single (thus hopefully consistent) adult during their formative years. And not only merely cared for, but also given lots of individual love and attention of the sort that is lacking when a child is sent to a nursery or day-care every day. I firmly believe that that is a huge factor in producing well-behaved and well-educated adults who have sound social values. Next is that there is far more time to spend on non-essential household tasks that improve the quality of life for both people. Meals, for example, are a lot better if time is spent preparing them from fresh ingredients and cooking at the optimum rate rather than having insufficient time to cook properly and resorting to frozen microwave food, or ordering from the local takeaway.
As a departure from the traditional, I see no reason why the housewife should not also undertake household repair, redecoration and other DIY tasks, which will improve the house and save money that would otherwise have been spent on tradesmen.
The average individual family cannot survive on a single salary without suffering a significant loss of living standards. The ever-rising fixed expenses such as mortgage/rent, council tax, water, electricity, gas etc. have resulted in *very* little money left over from the wages of an average worker, and in many cases the second income is necessary to even be able to afford to buy a reasonable amount of food, let alone any luxury/leisure items.
It is more an attitude of mind and expectations than a reorganisation of society. A married couple in the UK are perfectly prepared to sacrifice their life to some extent in order to raise children. In other countries thare is *exactly* the same attitude and expectation regarding the care of parents in their old age. A couple will marry and sacrifice much of their time to caring for their children. Following that, an elderly relative will move in and they will devote more time to caring for that relative. And finally they will themselves become old and frail, and move in with a son or daughter. It is something that is taken as a given and normal sequence of events in any average life. Sending a parent to a care home is as unusual as it is to send a child to a care home in the UK.
It is my strong belief that the change in attitude has arisen
*because* the state decided to step in and take over responsibility for that care. I have said before and I say it again - countries that have little or no social benefits system have far closer-knit and caring communities, which in turn means less anti-social behaviour at all levels. State handouts, unless carefully restricted to only those very few who genuinely have no other recourse, create a huge social problem by taking away individual responsibility (and therefore making people irresposible).One reform that sounds very drastic, but which I feel would end up with many benefits in the long run would be to disallow any benefits whatsoever to people who have a close family member who would be capable of supporting them, and to make it *obligitory* for people with the means to support any close relation who is currently in receipt of state benefits. Not only will it ease the tax burden, but anyone being forced to live with and be supported by a brother/sister/uncle is likely to be far more motivated to become independent than someone being housed and fed by the government. They are certainly unlikely to get away with lazing about all day and squandering money on booze!
Notions of luxury and necessity are for most relative. Perhaps more important is the security of a double income; being able to make ends meet for a while at least if one person in the household loses their job.
Sure - whilst still "working from home" and taking a salary for the first job ...
I'm not sure it is. What you say, is akin to saying that both cooperation and defection are two-way streets in the prisoner's dilemma, when in fact only cooperation is a two-way street, whilst defection is not necessarily so.
I'm not sure I've ever said "one can never trust one's employer". Anyway, it would depend on what the trust concerned, and also whether you are making a comparative assessment of their personal character, or looking at their role within the system and their likely behaviour based on systemic pressures.
As for whether it would be a good thing to let me work from home, it could go either way for an employer, could it not, depending on the quality of the relationship. I'm of a more conscientious and cooperative disposition than most, but so too I'm of a more punitive disposition than most when faced with a parasitic competitor.
I'm not sure that does reflect my own feelings, either at the present time with my current employer, or as a matter of generality. I make a much clearer cleavage between rich and poor, than between employer and employee. There are plenty of poor and exploited employers - small businessmen of the sort who keel over with a heart attack in their
50s! What is reprehensible in some cases however, is that small businessmen in particular can often throw their lot in with the rich.Indeed. The retention of autonomy in when and how work is carried out, is a powerful (if not perfect) means of enforcing fairness and trust, because any unfairness is immediately penalised by adverse changes to the important but hard-to-measure qualities of the work being done.
Indeed.
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