Why We Need Social Distancing From Our Bosses

Many American workers—at least the more fortunate ones who haven’t fallen ill or been laid off or hijacked by insurers—have been spending the long coronavirus quarantine in work-from-home mode. And that, in turn, means that they’re all too likely to bring the signature dysfunctions of the workplace home with them—from cascading deadlines to Zoom-enabled virtual meetings to, yes, Taylorized micromanagement of any errant daydreaming, family communiqués, or panicked online searches to get a case of Purell shipped overnight.

There’s also a steady drumbeat of online exhortations to make your leisure time more productive under coronavirus lockdown, as the forces of surveillance capitalism track our mass migration into jury-rigged home offices: Develop a hobby or tackle a big new creative project; work out more aggressively or buy more stuff on Facebook!

This relentless din of praise for home-centered productivity is just what we don’t need in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, argues New Republic staff writer Nick Martin. “This mindset is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture—the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement,” Martin writes. “And in a literal pandemic, as millions of us are trying to practice home isolation while also attending to the needs of our families and communities, the obscenity of pretending that work and ‘the self’ are the only things that matter—or even exist—becomes harder to ignore.”

Yet some version of this obscenity is very much business as usual for American workplaces and homes alike. So it has come as no great surprise that the more hierarchy-minded companies managing the work-to-home transition, such as the Wall Street Journal, have sought to put the boss’s agenda always and everywhere before the homebound worker’s screen and diligently productive fingertips. Managers at the WSJ mothership duly instructed their remote workforce “to answer work chat messages ‘within just a few minutes’ and to leave cameras on during video conference meetings, as if there’s some productivity or accountability benefit to letting your boss see what the shitty couch in your apartment looks like,” Martin notes. “The ‘good worker’ during a pandemic is the good worker during any other time: always available to management. (‘Now is not the time to screen calls.’)”

Such close-in focus on efficient task performance as we all drastically readjust our sense of what’s normal before the coronavirus threat is little short of psychotic, Martin suggests:

This isn’t a normal time, from the spread of the virus itself to the pathetic response from Congress to the quarantine and long-term economic peril staring down millions of people. Not much of what preceded it was really normal, either, but it’s fair to say that when the world is slowly descending into the unknown, any semblance of familiar routine can be a welcome reprieve: Staying in phone contact with loved ones and friends. Finding time to go for a (socially distant) run. But more work, maybe the single most constant feature of American adulthood, is not the answer. Neither is more needless productivity. This is not a time to optimize or stoically pretend nothing has changed.

In lieu of this narrow-minded focus on self-improvement and self-enhanced productivity in a social vacuum, we should be attending to the bigger issues facing us in conditions of quarantine—maintaining a sense of connection and community among the vast numbers of Americans adversely affected by the crisis. “The work of care, of real meaning, is what we should be concerning ourselves with now,” Martin argues:

It is not optimized, or “disrupting,” or any of that. It is just essential. Reaching out to offer support to the soon-to-be overworked nurses in our communities, contributing to local funds and efforts to feed and adequately compensate grocery workers, restaurant workers, and others who are working at great risk and may be struggling to put food on the table. We should be offering to make shopping runs for our elders and other at-risk neighbors. This is the essential work that demands our attention now, too.

So yes, lockdown America: Let’s get busy looking after one another as our health and lives are at risk. And if your bosses beg to differ, just discreetly mute them on those endless morning conference calls.

—Chris Lehmann, Editor