UK economy: Following a pandemic, millions of homeworkers may never return to the office.

“The economy needs people to work again,” Foreign Minister Dominik Raab told the BBC this week.

The tone of most British media is even sharper. “The ghost town of Britain MUST return to work and Boris Johnson must lead the way,” read the headline of Caroline Fairbairn, head of the Confederation of British Industry.

Shelley Asquith, health, safety and welfare policy specialist at TUC, the UK trade union congress, describes the national debate about returning to work as a blame game.

“Several sections of the media have made a concerted effort to expose that a lot of people who work from home don’t actually work,” she told CNN Business. “And there is no understanding of how hard people worked in isolation.”

“Some of the rhetoric that has been used lately … is horrible,” added Phil Taylor, who conducts work from home experience research for the Labor Rights Institute, saying it “distracts attention from gross negligence on the part of employees. government for months. “

“Lives are at stake here,” Taylor told CNN Business. “If people don’t want to go back to the office, they shouldn’t be blamed for everything.”

‘This is incredibly irresponsible’

Despite weeks of efforts from government ministers, the difficulties of getting the UK back into office can best be described by the reaction to last week’s cleaning detergent advertisement.

A highly publicized advertisement for Dettol cleaning product. went viral on the London underground network with its wayward list of all the “little things we love” in the office – like “carrying a purse”, “taking the elevator” and “randomly answering everyone.”

“Thank you Dettol for convincing me to work from home forever,” historian Alex von Tunselmann replied, outlining the thoughts of many online commentators.

“If anything, it just reminded everyone why they want to keep working from home,” Asquith added.

“Where workers are in relatively close proximity to each other, there is a possibility of infection,” Taylor said, citing numerous cases where call centers across the country have opened only to close amid a surge in infections.

According to him, Taylor’s research “makes it absolutely clear that people are identifying serious problems with the work environment.” “The density of the existing office space is such that it is almost impossible to maintain effective social distancing.”

Concerns about the economy are at the heart of the puzzle – while home-based work has led to an increase in local housing estates, city centers remain largely deserted since last year, Mike Cherry, national chairman of the Small Business Federation, told CNN Business. The pandemic has been hit particularly hard by street food and coffee chains, after the number of people on busy streets immediately stopped and subsequently failed to return to pre-lockdown levels.

A paradigm shift in British work

The pandemic has also ushered in a new era of home-based work, which many employees simply do not want to give up – and this is becoming a serious problem for the government.

“One of the things that has happened as a result of this ban is that people have found they have places where they can work easily and with fewer distractions – and there are benefits to working from home,” Paul said. Bernal, whose tweet is critical of the Daily The first page of an email addressing the issue went viral last week.

“More people recognized it than I expected and than the government expected,” he told CNN Business.

Bernal is now one of countless workers who disagree with government messages and hope for more flexible mechanisms in the future.

He challenged any assumptions about the impact on performance. “I produced a hell of a lot while I was locked up – probably more than I did before,” he said.

“The government and the media feel hypocritical that they want people to take risks for the good of others, not for themselves,” he added. “The suggestion that we are somehow selfish in choosing to work from home and that we should sacrifice ourselves for the common good – but what is the greater good in this case?

“In fact, achieving a good work-life balance is a great benefit.”

This opinion will surely cause trouble for officials, as they strive to return people to cities every day.

These new ways of thinking about work have hardly been discussed in the UK, but it is time for many unions and workers to do it.

And as tensions rise between the two camps, it becomes increasingly unlikely that spending five days a week in the office will ever become the norm in the United Kingdom again. “It’s time for a paradigm shift in how people work,” said Taylor of the Labor Rights Institute.