You are fired!

What actually means the transition to remote work: the economist explains

The coming week of the holidays is a good reason to think about what you will do when your workplace is reset. Do not look at the channels of models involved in the terraces of their mansions, do not read the steris of stargoters on how to promote their own channel and not pay attention to the advice of experts in remote work. A marvelous new world of online communications may not be as pleasant as it looked while you, sitting in a warm office, squinted at the smartphone screen and swept photos of attractive faces.

Transfer to remote work is a medicine with very strong side consequences, a medicine that will be extremely bitter for the bulk of workers.

In fact, we simply do not realize the extent to which the economy of large cities is imprisoned not just for movement, but to “mix” the enormous human mass. To come to the office, you need a car, a taxi or a bus. To be in this office, you need clothes. So that you can work, during the day you need to eat something and more than once. On the way from work, you will go to the store, buy something, albeit unnecessary, but! - Spend the money, which means, create a demand that will turn into new goods, services and jobs. Getting together and wandering together in the mazes of the big city, people every second create a demand -question for goods -services -advertising. And demand gives birth to a new offer. That is how the townspeople create work for each other, the more, the better.

And as soon as the inhabitants of the agglomerations were locked in their apartments, the urban economy began to contract, panting like light, struck by the virus. However, the money that the governments of all countries began to distribute to citizens is not just support that should allow people to survive the black weeks of quarantine. Thousands of dollars and euros that people will receive have a different task. This money should prevent the collapse of the labor and salaries market.

The current crisis is not due to economic circumstances, but by political decisions. The economy was “paused” forcedly, and the governments expect that as soon as the restrictions are removed, the business will certainly begin to gain momentum, and everything will be fine. But for this, two conditions must be met. People should have money. People should have work.

The unemployment manual is a complex economic mechanism, its task: to prevent a situation in which a highly qualified specialist, left without funds, will be forced to sell his work for a penny. If this happens, then we have lost the experience and knowledge of such a specialist for the economy. And the entrepreneur, faced with an excess of the offer of cheap labor, will lose motivation for any technological tricks. Why do I need innovation and efficiency, he will say if any hole in production can shut up with cheap working hands?

At the same time, the remote work that people who find themselves on a forced quarantine pose a serious threat for their earnings and for the urban economy. It is no coincidence that the Danish economists, commenting on the unprecedented measures of their government on the financial support of citizens and entrepreneurs, emphasize that we are now not talking about any “basic income”, and the situation when workers work at home, receiving the same money, cannot “become familiar”.

What is the matter? The fact that when you get up to work, then you and the employer “by default” suggest that you will have to get to the office, spend money on your appearance, buy food. In general, from the point of view of the economy, you have some “constant costs” that should be included in your salary.

But if you get to work “from home”, then the employer also “delete” these costs from the alleged salary by default.

Why pay more than your rental apartment and bags with cereal can cost you a courier will deliver. Do not want to work on such conditions? Well, to hell with you

The employer will say, I will find others. If we are talking about online, then is it all the same where such an employee will sit: in the center of Moscow or in Tsarevo-Virusovo. The choice is large, the demand exceeds the proposal. In the middle of the year before last, the managers of the London docks hired movers to the forced work, throwing rubber rings into their crowd. There were fewer rings than “self -employed” applicants, there was a fight behind the rings, where the strongest one that received the work won. On the same principle, the work of all fashionable online platforms for hiring is built: make people fight for work-and choose the best at the lowest price.

The transition to remote work also carries other risks. Now, for example, in big cities, people can somehow live in small apartments and studios, coming only to sleep there, the rest of the time they spend outside the house. But now it will take much more free space in the home nest. Developers do not care: instead of office centers, they will build more than two -room apartments. Only you will have to pay more for them.

Anyone who is touched by remote work most often confuses it with a “free schedule” or freelance. But this is not the same thing.

An employee who has a privilege to appear at the workplace, when he considers it necessary, he actually receives not a “salary”, but to rent from his unique skills, knowledge or status. The freelancer simply sells the result of his work. But the “remote employee” will have to prepare for troubles. Already now there are many programs to control the intensity and speed of such work. And the demand for them will only grow. The boss can be deceived by imitation of activity at the workplace, it will be more difficult to deceive the car.

Demand for electronic-fiberonal systems in Russia will develop faster than anywhere else in the world. In any case, from the declared plan for supporting the economy it follows that the salvation of the drowning should be the work of the drowning themselves. The authorities did not express the desire to part with the accumulated reserves and prefers to wait until the problem is resolved somehow by itself.

Therefore, salaries on the holidays will have to pay entrepreneurs, taxes are not canceled, but only delayed, raising unemployment benefits to the size of the minimum wage, of course good, only “on the minimum wage” cannot exist even at remote work. The deferment of payments on loans will be compensated by an increase in interest for those who can pay. And a decrease in insurance premiums is the right thing, only in this situation it hardly motivates entrepreneurs to hire new employees. Most likely, they will think how to get rid of the old ones and make the remaining work even more intensively - so as not to face the need to pay salaries in the absence of a cash flow.

In the risk zone everyone finds themselves - and first of all those who were now offered to work at a distance or even relax.