A new report for the City of Winnipeg has concluded that giving city employees whose jobs can be done from home the ability to do so has been beneficial for the city, with better staff satisfaction and retention as well as saving $119,000 a year on printing costs, with apparently no significant loss in productivity. Despite this, though, Transcona Coun. Russ Wyatt has introduced a motion to council's Executive Policy Committee, seconded by Charleswood-Tuxedo-Westwood Coun. Evan Duncan, calling for the city to end all such arrangements, and Mayor Scott Gillingham seems to sympathize (albeit a bit more cautiously). Wyatt's claims that "other studies" (unspecified) indicate that productivity is worse with WFH, and Duncan expressed concern that a study done by city staff is inherently biased in favour of WFH because he assumes that the staff doing the study are working from home themselves and want to keep it that way.
One wonders about the real motivation; in Gillingham's case (and probably Duncan's as well) this may be the result of pressure from downtown businesses and commercial real estate interests. As far as Wyatt goes, it's more likely the politics of envy - he represents a part of the city with a lot of blue-collar workers whose jobs can't be done from home and probably resent those who can, in a "crabs in a bucket" sort of way. Those same people have also doubtless been primed with all kinds of lore about how lazy public sector workers supposedly are. The thing is, ending WFH will not improve their lot at all. In fact if anything it will mean they have to compete with more people for space on the road or on the bus, but they're not going to let that get in the way of their "righteous" populist rage.
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