Ryan Bridge: Bureaucrats shouldn't get work from home flexibility

Remember the outrage over bureaucrats working for home, even though Covid was a distant memory?

The Government came in and said they should all pack their lunch and go back to work. Problem is, this isn't happening.

Mike's Minute: We're still talking about working from home

One of the "never the twain shall meet" moments that came out of Covid was working from home.

Here we are, five years on, and the battle has not only not died, it's intensified.

The big gab fest this week in Canberra had the unions asking for a four-day week.

Sir Bob Jones: The guts about working from home

The debate rages as some employees who have had a lovely indulgent time since Covid, with the ‘Working from Home’ racket, complain about being ordered back to the office.

But here’s the guts of the issue. An employer offers a position in an office. Potential employees can either take it or reject it. But they can’t decide to take it then say they want to do it differently on terms (WFH) according to their whims. It’s that elementary.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: The Public Services Association Union is Causing Public Services in NZ to Collapse...

The Public Services Association Union is Causing Public Services in NZ to Collapse, Nurses, Teachers & Police to Leave for Australia & mass unemployment in Wellington.

The working-from-home, sometimes called "remote working", debate has heated up in Wellington with the Prime Minister and Finance Minister pushing for more public sector workers to return to the office. What does Labour Economics have to say about this matter? A lot.

Kerre Woodham: The Public Service Commission should be keeping track of who's working from home

The big corporations have already started ordering their staff back into the office, now the Government’s had enough too. Nicola Willis made the announcement yesterday. While carefully defined, working from home arrangements can benefit workers and employers, she said, if the pendulum swings too far in favour of working from home, there are downsides. And that's even before we consider the effects for the CBD retailers, restaurants and cafes.

Mike's Minute: We are better off coming back to the office

A couple of things interested me with the Government's back-to-work edict:

1) We need a back-to-work edit and the fact we haven't had one until now.

2) Sadly, the admission no one knows what the hell is going on, who is where, what percentage of time people aren't there, how many aren't there, when they are or are not there compared with any other piece of the public service, etc.

It's Mickey mouse stuff.

David Farrar: The role of the public service is not to create shoppers

Stuff reports:

There are calls from some Wellington businesses for the Government to follow the lead of one of the world’s biggest companies – Amazon – and order workers to stop working from home.

Sir Bob Jones: Government departments excesses the working from home fiction

A week back I had lunch with two of the capital’s best known citizens.

At one stage the subject turned to the working from home nonsense and we enjoyed ourselves citing examples we personally knew of various “working from home” shysters busy building a new deck, on the golf course and so on.

Bruce Cotterill: Too much working from home isn’t working

Last week’s  Weekend Herald [18/11/23] published a short article that highlighted the extent to which we are still grappling with life after Covid-19.

The headline read, “Students win fight not to attend uni in person”. It said the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association had won the right for students not to attend lectures in person, but to watch recordings instead.

According to the article, part of the argument revolved around ensuring easy access to lectures for disabled students.

Bob Jones: "Working from home"

David Seymour makes no bones about his desire to clean up the grossly excessive bureaucracy.

Some of his expressed goals, such as wiping out the farcical Women’s Affairs Department, an agency set up in the 1980s by the then Labour Government as a sop to Labour’s left, angry at Rogernomics, is easily disposed of.