Trusting Workers
There’s been some noise made the last few months about the number of federal workers who started working from home during COVID and are fighting to not return to the very expensive workplaces taxpayers provide them. We’ve heard plenty of stories about office space the federal government is renting but sits empty…not to mention office space in buildings the government owns that also has desks gathering dust.
That led the podcast platform Spotify to poke fun at the issue, with signs and billboards reading, “Spotify Workers Aren’t Children”—this is in the wake of statements made by company officials doubling down on their work-from-home policy and saying it trusts workers to be productive and get the job done outside a formal office, adding that they “aren’t children” who need heavy supervision.
If that’s true, then good for Spotify. But think for a minute about people you currently work with, or who work for you—do you trust them to work from home, or without direct supervision? Obviously, you hope so…but if not, then that says something pretty significant about your private workplace.
Multiply any skepticism about the private workplace times a zillion and you have the federal government workforce. To be clear, there may be plenty of folks who are on the federal payroll who never leave their home but still could easily win productivity awards. But given all the examples of government waste and mismanagement—who could blame the taxpayers for being skeptical about these “work from home” positions; especially the huge number of them, with some estimates showing fewer than 10 percent of an agency’s workforce actually shows up at an office.
It’s good that Spotify workers aren’t children…given child labor laws and all. But in this era of government overspending, we need more accountability, not less. At the very least, having all these remote workers warrants a situational review, DOGE or not.
