There has been a very public debate about the costs and benefits of telework. Employers have struggled to strike a balance between having an in situ workforce and flexible teleworkers, as both are needed in the post-Fordist workplace. Both have their benefits: offering telework options to employees can help retain quality workers, as it allows employees the flexibility to attend to childcare needs and leisure activities, making for happier workers (Grzywacz, Casey, and Jones, 2007, p. 1308). Companies can also cut down on overhead costs for electricity, heat, building maintenance, grounds upkeep, and the like, by shifting workers to remote locations, where office space may be cheaper, or by allowing them to work in their own homes (Kitou and Horvath 2008). According to Jeffrey Hill and his colleagues, “one of the major benefits of mobile telework might be a greater flexibility to manage household chores and child care” (Hill et al, 1996, p. 298). On paper, it can often seem like a win-win for both workers and employers. However, that is not the whole story.
Some authors conclude that telework is likely to blur the boundaries between work and home, leading to increased frequency of “work/family transition periods,” which are moments when a parent is leaving for work, or coming from work (Hill et al, 1996, p. 298). These can often be very stressful periods of time, and so to increase the amount of work/family transition periods per day can lead to a subsequent intensification in feelings of anxiety, or the perception of being “out of control.” Much of the discourse on telework is occupied by stories of employee overwork and reduced worker
collaboration, we should not be surprised to see its popularity wavering in some circles, or slow to catch on altogether (Noonan and Glass, 2012; Mann and Holdsworth, 2003; Gurstein, 2001).
A March 7th, 2014 article in the New York Times entitled “It’s Unclearly Defined, But Telecommuting is Fast on the Rise,” perfectly captures this ambiguous state of telework at the current historical moment. The title is misleading because the actual content of the article demonstrates that determining the future of telework is just as difficult as defining what a teleworker is. The author Alina Tugend cites several scholarly studies, many of which argue that telework is increasing year by year—a 79% increase between 2005 and 2012 by one estimate—or that contrary to prevailing assumptions about teleworkers being stay-at-home mothers, teleworkers are actually comprised of women and men, young and old, parents and single people (Tugend, 2014). Tugend then conveys some of the problems with telework, bringing in research that demonstrates how it makes interpersonal communication more difficult, can lead to overwork, and hurts employee’s chances of promotions (Tugend, 2014). Ultimately, the article concludes that it is hard to pin down to what degree telework is increasing, if at all, and ends by
reminding us that there is no consensus on just how much teleworking is too much. This article makes the same mistake that much of the scholarly literature on telework does, which is that it attempts to conclude definitively that telework is either going to grow or destined to fail, is always good or always bad. This is an impossible task though, as the first step of defining teleworkers, let alone counting how many exist, is a futile effort. According to Global Workplace Analytics, a pro-telework consulting and research agency, the politics of defining and counting telecommuters is a struggle:
“Studying the work-at-home population is a little like trying to study meteoroids. We know there are a lot of them and we know they’re important, but we don’t know where they all are and not everyone agrees on which ones to count” (Global Workplace Analytics).
Studying teleworkers has been called a “methodological nightmare,” as the difficulties in “assessing both the quantity and quality of telework are compounded by problems of definition” (Haddon and Silverstone, 1993, p. 7). Depending on how one defines it, teleworkers can be full-time home based workers, or people who use their smartphone on the weekend to answer work emails after spending forty or more hours in the office during the week. Forbes publishes a list of 100 companies that allow
telecommuting, and it contains many well-known corporations such as Xerox, Dell, IBM, American Express, Amazon, and Microsoft (Shin, 2015). Looking at the major
companies that have telework programs can give us some sense of the extent of telework in large industries, but it fails to account for all of the small companies that have remote- work programs, or individuals who have autonomous flexible arrangements at their workplace.
Therefore, attempting to understand the scope and impact of telework by looking at how many teleworkers exist, and where they work, is not practical, ultimately
misguided, and does nothing to illuminate the conditions under which telework is
deployed. Instead, we need ask, is telework introduced into a workplace to the benefit of capital or labor—or both, or neither? If we want to understand why telework’s capacity and growth is uncertain, then we need to explore the factors that contribute to telework’s deployment in the workplace, and who benefits from the programs. We can learn more by
examining why telework is used, or not used, than we can by trying to quantify
teleworkers, or devise a perfect set of definitions. A political economy analysis is the best method to address these questions because they concern the production, circulation, and distribution of products, as well as explore the interplay between profit motives and the organization and management of labor.
In this chapter, I will analyze the costs and benefits of telework policies to better understand the political economic justification for employers to support or reject
telework, and also explore how teleworking impacts the workers financially. I address these questions in three parts. First, I look at the ways companies stand to save money by instituting telework policies for their employees, or a subsection of their employees. The second section examines telework from the employee perspective, particularly how and to what degree teleworking affects workers in positive and negative ways. In the third section, I explore the circumstances companies have encountered which cause them to reject telework policies in favor of more traditional location based arrangements. Following that, I tie these three strands together in a concluding analysis.