The Return of Home Work
By 
This way of dividing time shaped American lives for decades, despite the introduction of a series of new media technologies. At the end of the 19th century, the quiet of the idealized Victorian home was shattered by the ringing of the first telephones. Americans who had once gone to visit one another in person, calling cards in hand, now learned to make phone calls. Doctors who once had to make house calls could be consulted by phone. Within a few decades, Americans could pick up the phone and dial the pharmacist or the florist to place an order. One after another, across the 20th century, the radio, the television and even the lowly fax machine beamed news of distant happenings into living rooms and kitchens. But none of these devices on their own challenged the fundamental separation of personal time and work time. Americans simply learned how to set their clocks to catch their favorite programs and how not to be home when the boss called.
That changed in the early 1980s, when computers became small enough for desktop use and the internet linked them together. Today computers feel as if they’ve been with us forever. But the earliest all-electronic digital computers appeared less than a single lifetime ago, and until the 1970s, virtually all computers were room-size machines. By the early 1980s, they had become all-purpose appliances. They could handle text like a typewriter and calculations like an adding machine, and they could do it all on screens like those of a television. Inexpensive dial-up modems let home users work online, with their colleagues, in real time, as if they were also sitting in the office. Before too long laptops and smartphones made it possible to work from anywhere, anytime.
The effects of this transformation vary a great deal depending on what you do for a living. The same core technologies that allow a Silicon Valley software developer to move to Colorado and work from a mountain retreat keep Starbucks baristas and home health care workers on tenterhooks. In the industrial era, work schedules had to be set in advance. It was possible to change shifts at the last minute, but an employer might not be able to find the workers he was looking for if they weren’t standing by landline phones. Today computers allow companies to monitor market demands in real time and adjust workers’ schedules on the fly. Cellphones let bosses reach workers wherever and whenever they like. It has become as easy for supervisors to demand that service workers reschedule their shifts as it has for software developers to decide when and where they write code. It is no longer possible for many Americans to divide their days into periods of labor and leisure with any predictability.
Digital technologies have also extended employers’ powers to surveil, which in turn undercuts the ability of workers to ensure that they are being paid fairly. On the 19th-century factory floor, bosses could see everything workers did, but unless they hired private detectives or required workers to live in company-owned towns, their powers of surveillance stopped at the factory gates. Today, when we work at home, our computers make it easy for our bosses to track our keystrokes, control our cameras and tap our microphones. They can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and put together a picture of our political beliefs, our patterns of association, our sexual proclivities and our propensity to unionize. In contrast, our ability to watch them is radically curtailed, by law and by design. Algorithms are trade secrets. Monitoring software is a one-way mirror that makes it impossible for workers to peer back.
And every future tech advance–very much including self-driving vehicles–are going to be used by employers to wrest more of your time away from you. The return of home work is not something we should celebrate. Yes, not commuting is great. There is a price to be paid there too–the 8 pm text message, the 6 am zoom, the Sunday work to meet a Monday morning deadline.