Push to get staff back to offices amid warning of UK's 'ghost towns'
Workers will be encouraged to return to the office as part of a major media campaign to be launched by the government next week. The television and newspaper messages will promote the government’s aim to reduce the number of employees working from home amid fears that town and city centres are becoming ghost areas as workers stay away.
A report in the Telegraph said the campaign would push the emotional and mental health benefits of mixing with colleagues but also said that ministers would warn that those working from home could be more vulnerable to being sacked.
What does that have to do with it you fucking mong? My position will still be "fuck them they're earning plenty."
Have you misinterpreted that as me also saying fuck the other ones who are not earning that much? Because that is categorically not what I said, and it's the only way I can conceive that you think it matters.
>The Civil Service headcount increased by 10,930 in the year to March 2020 and stands at 456,410. On a full-time equivalent (FTE) basis Civil Service employment stands at 423,770
>There are 4,000 plus in the Senior Civil Service (SCS), including many who work outside Whitehall, many specialists, and many who have been recruited direct from the private and voluntary sectors.
>>35007 >What does that have to do with it you fucking mong?
Don't look at me, you're the one who claimed they were a "significant chunk". Which, as >>35008 points out, they are not.
Can you point out the factually inaccurate statement I made?
This entire debate has swung out from the fact I said "fuck anyone earning over £50,000", that's my opinion and will remain my opinion regardless how many people it applies to, and regardless of any other circumstances. That statement had no bearing on the pay rates in the rest of the civil service, because I wasn't talking about them, I was talking about people earning over £50,000. If I had said something like "everyone in the civil service gets paid £50,000" there would be something to pick at here, but I said nothing of the sort. Furthermore a term like "chunk" is entirely subjective, and in my view 4,000 people is a chunk, so tough shit. You will find no standard index definition of "chunk".
This debate is absurd, it's one thing to be pedantic but there's nothing to even be pedantic about here. Just one lad who read an implication into one post that wasn't actually there.
>Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg has been criticised for leaving a note for civil servants, saying "sorry you were out when I visited". The note, printed on government paper with Mr Rees-Mogg's title, was left at empty desks and read "I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon."
>Mr Rees-Mogg has said all civil servants must stop working from home.
>>38285 There's absolutely a strike brewing and he's at the heart of it. Things were bad enough with a decade of falling wages and a refusal to pay back overpaid pension contributions but only yesterday PCS announced they were in dispute after Reese-Mogg pushed for cuts to civil service redundancy at the same time as conveniently calling for 65,000 jobs to be lost.
>Tesla Shanghai to Enter "Closed-Loop" System With Workers Sleeping in Factory
>Tesla Inc. has restarted production at its Shanghai factory and laid out stringent measures for staff operating in the so-called closed-loop system, according to people familiar with the matter. The electric-vehicle maker will provide each worker with a sleeping bag and mattress, a memo sent to employees and viewed by Bloomberg shows. Given there isn’t any purpose-built dorm, people will be required to sleep on the floor in a designated area and there will be other spaces allocated for showering, entertainment (both yet-to-be completed) and catering, the memo shows.
>All employees will have to take a nucleic acid test daily for the first three days, have their temperature checked twice a day and wash their hands four times a day, twice in the morning and twice again in the afternoon, the memo shows. Workers will be provided with three meals and be given an allowance of about 400 yuan ($63) a day, although the actual amount will depend on a person’s position and level, one of the people said.
>Officials in Shanghai have been encouraging companies to restart production that was halted due to the city’s strict lockdown by using closed-loop systems in which workers live on site at their factories. So far, more than 600 firms have restarted operations, including Quanta Computer Inc., which makes laptops for Apple Inc. Prior to the pandemic-inducted halt on March 28, Tesla workers in Shanghai were working three shifts covering 24 hours, seven days a week. Factory staff would work four days on and then have two days off. Now, they’re being asked to work 12 hours a day, six days straight with one day off, people familiar with the matter said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-18/tesla-shanghai-sets-out-hand-washing-sleeping-plans-for-workers
Finally, a reliable way to get those drones back into the office where they belong.
Boris Johnson says he gets distracted by cheese and coffee while working from home
The prime minister revealed his worktime weaknesses in an opinion article for the Daily Mail to claim that WFH – a necessity for millions of workers during the Covid pandemic – “doesn’t work” in his “experience”. He also claimed that people who work from the communal office are more professionally and economically productive than those who WFH.
Mr Johnson said: “My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing. So, I believe in the workplace environment. And I think that will help to drive up productivity, it will get our city centres moving, in the weekdays. And it will be good for mass transit. And a lot of businesses that have been having a tough time will benefit from that.”
>>38403 >If we sacked working-from-home civil servants, would anyone notice?
My partner works for the Civil Service, started during WFH time, and in a year of working there she has been in the office three times. During that time, they moved into a fancy new office block purpose built for the department, but its layout and size means that on any given day, only 20% of the people working in the department will have desk space. If the government want to go back to WFH being a niche thing, they probably shouldn't have spent tens of millions on offices that can't hold 80% of the active staff.
Why do I have to be on the frontline of some new battle for employment rights. Would someone mind putting an FOI in on the screen time for departments and the backlog on flexi and unused leave? It's well known they actually are keeping statistics on just about everything you do but for some mysterious reason you never hear anyone talk about it.
>>38408 Having offices dangerously over capacity was the norm even before the pandemic. Pushing meetings with foreign officials to their own country because we don't have the space, fire-alarms that took a good 20 minutes to get out the building, the absolute shambles of booking meeting rooms privately for industry where it was cheaper to hold the meeting in Europe and 2-days a week WFH starting to be enforced to try and deal with overcrowding.
I don't doubt for a minute that the Government would push us all back into the office anyway and have us working in the corridors. And then we'd get a lovely email about handling whatever crisis comes next. Then they'd sack half the office on efficiency grounds so we have to bring in more consultants on four-times the pay.
Well, I've been ordered back into the office. I look forward to sitting in traffic for an hour to be somewhere I'm less productive and having exorbitantly expensive lunches with people I don't like.
>>38411 Can you guess what happened just after this post was made:
>Not enough desks as DfE staff ordered back to crowded offices
>Staff at the Department for Education have had to work in corridors and canteens after the government’s return-to-the-office edict because the DfE has almost twice as many workers as desks. Whole teams have been turned away from some offices because of over-crowding. And rural staff and those with caring responsibilities are considering their futures as even pre-pandemic flexibility is “deemed unacceptable”.
>Staff outnumber desks by almost two-to-one across the DfE’s 12 offices, figures seen by Schools Week show. In Leeds, there are just 24 desks for 110 staff. Bristol has 95 desks for 299 staff. But bosses have decreed that staff should work at least 80 per cent of their week in the office.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/not-enough-desks-as-dfe-staff-ordered-back-to-crowded-offices/
>Working from home is making Britain more unequal, the Resolution Foundation has warned, as the practice fails to benefit more deprived areas.
>Analysis of the impact on local economies showed home working had delivered “a boost to relatively affluent areas of England”, but could have a “worrying” effect on poorer communities.
>Wealthier areas have seen the most benefit to date, because lots of people can work remotely - but fewer workplaces are empty, the foundation’s Right Where You Left Me report found.
>Almost one in six workers, 15 per cent, were continuing to mainly work from home after the pandemic at the start of this year, with 23 per cent working remotely.
>The report also warned low-paid households risk being “priced out” of homes in areas traditionally overlooked by commuters but now more in demand, amid the rise of flexible working.
>Last month, data from the Office for National Statistics found that working from home was the preserve of the middle-aged and wealthy, with high earners being most likely to “hybrid work”. There have also been concerns about the impact of homeworking on productivity, with research from PwC UK suggesting a hit to GDP of around £15 billion a year.
>>38713 Hang on a minute, what this actually says is that deprived areas have seen property prices rise fastest following the migration of better paid workers and that therefore remote working is not a magic solution to levelling up but we instead really need to start building some fucking houses (presumably some time in the 1990s). On the other end of the spectrum you have areas that have seen clear success and others were property prices have risen slower (i.e. the commuter belt).
https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/reports/right-where-you-left-me/
It's conclusion is that the impact has been minimal. I know the Torygraph takes the piss but they've managed to target a report that sides against government policy to mean something else entirely in order to attack people working from home which is the governments new hobby.
>There have also been concerns about the impact of homeworking on productivity, with research from PwC UK suggesting a hit to GDP of around £15 billion a year.
Is this the one nobody has seen yet, disagrees with what PwC said back in November and apparently used worker surveys in February this year to say that workers wanted to be in the office?
>attack people working from home which is the governments new hobby.
I was confused about this until Dominic Cummings pointed out the obvious. Magazine and newspaper circulations have collapsed since the pandemic, because there aren't as many bored commuters looking for something to read on the train. Newspaper proprietors want an end to home working purely so that they can sell more papers; this government is so utterly spineless that they're willing to play along.
I work from home, maybe spend less time buying shite on Amazon and using your money to learn AWS Practitioner on your account.
Then look for an entry level IT job. Stop buying pizzas and games, sit in your room for 12 months understanding s3 buckets, join IT Meetups in your area. Get known, be seen. Understand SaaS.
It brings me great amusement to see work-from-homers treated like the new benefit scroungers.
You poor dears. What, you've never been the scapegoats of a media-wide slander campaign purely because of your vague socio-economic demographic before? Diddums.
Starbucks is examining a possible sale of its UK business as the world’s largest coffee chain faces changing consumer habits after the pandemic and increased competition.
The chain oversees about 1,000 stores in the UK of which about 70 per cent are franchises and the rest company owned. Along with other coffee and food-to-go chains, Starbucks was hit hard by the pandemic lockdowns and is wrestling with how hybrid working has changed consumer habits
Starbucks said it was “not in a formal sale process for the company’s UK business” but that it continued to “evaluate strategic options” for those of its international businesses that are owned by the company. In the UK, Starbucks is “contending with operating cost increases at the same time that competition intensifies, with takeaway food chains and restaurants focusing on coffee as a secondary discounted offer”, according to its UK arm’s accounts for the year to October 2021.
Its UK arm, which employs about 4,000 people, returned to profit in the 12 months to October 2021, generating a pre-tax profit of £13.3mn on sales £328mn, after reporting a loss of £40.9mn a year earlier. The chain has said that footfall at office, travel and inner-city sites had been slower to recover than suburban and retail park locations.
In 2021, Starbucks exited a joint venture worth $2bn in South Korea, its fifth-largest market, selling its stake to its local partner and the Singaporean sovereign wealth group GIC, though it continues to receive royalties from the operation.
Corporations shouldn't be paying the amount of tax they are required to pay in law, they should be required to pay the amount of tax that The Guardian reckons they ought to pay.
We shouldn't listen to silly arguments like "we're a foreign corporation and pay most of our taxes in the country where we're headquartered" or "we don't actually make very much profit in the UK because it's a competitive market for coffee chains and our costs of doing business are very high". We should just look at the total profits of Starbucks' business activity internationally, stick our finger in the air and guess what share of those profits we think should be going to our government rather than someone else's government.
Don't listen to capitalist propaganda catchphrases like "it's against international law", "the US would be entitled to take retaliatory action against British companies" or "Britain's status as a global financial centre depends on a centuries-old reputation for stability in the rule of law". Those are just scare stories to stop us from taking what we reckon might be rightfully ours.
>>39006 >Britain's status as a global financial centre depends on a centuries-old reputation for stability in the rule of law
Sounds to me like a few uncompensated nationalisations is just what we need to affect a beneficial change in our comparative advantage. Give Germany the banks, we'll take the car factories. No need to be too rash though: We can continue to uphold the rights of corporations under international law just as we do with refugees and terror suspects. Goose, gander and all that.
>>39006 >Those are just scare stories to stop us from taking what we reckon might be rightfully ours.
Considering this government's track record with all those things, stick your bad faith arguments up your chunnel.
>>39006 >We shouldn't listen to silly arguments like "we're a foreign corporation and pay most of our taxes in the country where we're headquartered" or "we don't actually make very much profit in the UK because it's a competitive market for coffee chains and our costs of doing business are very high".
Spot on. They're empty arguments that have very little basis in reality. The "costs of doing business" thing in particular is bollocks because we know that they deliberately overcharge themselves for certain transactions run through international subsidiaries.
>The "costs of doing business" thing in particular is bollocks because we know that they deliberately overcharge themselves for certain transactions run through international subsidiaries.
That would be fraud. If HMRC suspect that you're doing that, they can just overrule your prices and base your taxable profits on their own assessment of arms-length prices without having to prove wrongdoing. If they can prove that you're doing it, you're looking at criminal sanctions. Transfer pricing isn't some sort of financial black art, it's a thoroughly documented part of international taxation with clearly defined rules.
In the case of Starbucks, they sell their coffee beans out of Switzerland, because that's the international centre of the coffee trade. They charge the same prices to franchisees, owned stores and co-branding customers. They charge royalties on the use of their intellectual property at industry-standard rates. The Swiss business that sells their beans isn't abnormally profitable and neither is the Dutch business that manages their IP. The accusations against them are all innuendo, because repeated inquiries have confirmed that they aren't doing anything wrong - no subterfuge, no shady practices, just textbook accounting.
>>39025 When people talk about closing tax loopholes, this is what they mean. If a crime was committed, obviously we could try and arrest them. The scandal is that this obviously suspicious practice is entirely legal.
The fact remains - they're selling shit to themselves at a profit, eroding their margins in the places they make the money and generating artificial profits in places where they have a brass plate on the wall.
I've noticed that they're really cracking the whip to get us all back into the office now that the job market isn't as desperate for staff as it once was. It's awful, I'm shattered from going into the office today and I'll have to do it tomorrow as well.
