Part of the divide and conquer aspect of history’s greatest social engineering project, the COVID “panic-demic,” was urging workers to stay home. Preferably masked, but whatever. But the panic is long over despite the heroic efforts of some to return to those “halcyon days” and desperate efforts to find a new microbe around which to build another panic, including even monkeypox, which rarely kills and is extremely hard to spread. Yet employers who insist that their telecommuting employees come back generally catch hell from the mainstream media.

Microsoft Media, which you’ll note has the same MSM abbreviation as “mainstream media,” recently warned, “Forcing Workers Back to the Office is ‘Dinosaur Management’ — and Companies Risk Losing Out, Expert Says.”

Actually, I consider being aligned with dinosaurs a compliment. Including that flying one the name of which I can’t spell. But just off the top of my dinosaur brain it seems to me that if companies want employees back, there’s probably a good reason. Afterall, it’s costly to provide office space and work station, even a cubicle with the various accoutrements and parking spaces, and so on. All other things being equal, it would seem preferable to have workers pay for that themselves. (READ MORE from Michael Fumento: The Buzz on ‘The Great Honey Bee Die-Off’)

Yes, there can be advantages to remote working — as some conservative publications have noted. But generally speaking evidence indicates it can have severe negative effects for both employer and employee.

Most recently the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology of the British Psychological Society says the telecommuting, overall, is mentally harmful. In so many words, the harm inflicted during lockdowns is to an extent still being perpetuated even though we are now free to roam and roam without a muzzle, even to the remarkable extent of going in either direction in supermarket aisles!

This needs a bit of perspective. 

Loneliness is a growing epidemic in the United States, with about half of U.S. adults reporting measurable levels even before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Surgeon General’s advisory report last year. It’s not just painful; it kills. Loneliness “is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death,” said the report, “similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.” 

Men bear the brunt. Only 48 percent of men reported feeling satisfied with friendships, according to a May 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life; only 1 in 5 men said they had gotten emotional support from a friend in the past week, compared with 4 in 10 women. And yes, it’s getting worse. Thus 15 percent of men today say they have no close friendships, a five-fold increase since 1990. 

Naturally, a great place to not be alone is at work. Personally, since graduating law school I’ve enjoyed every job in an office (with the exception of the one I dubbed, “The Job from Hell.”) far more than telecommuting. Wife or no, I enjoyed the camaraderie of the office and the chance to bounce ideas off of people.

And mind, if your boss is the proverbial pr**k, he can be one remotely as well.

But lots of influential people think telecommuting, regardless of what the employer wants, is Just This Side of Heaven. Mainstream media’s position has perhaps a couple of explanations. The most benign is that virtually everyone in the media relies to some extent or completely on freelance work. It works for them. Less benign is that the MSM support any and all aspects of “The New Normal.”

Certainly for some industries and many individual employees, remote work can be advantageous. 

But as we saw during the lockdowns, and more so in countries with harsher ones than in the U.S., all sorts of horribles arose from the lockdown isolation, including severe depression and anxiety, alcoholism and other drug use, stress, insomnia, depression, domestic violence, fatigue, and other disorders. Mind, some may have been related to anxiety over getting what often seemed portrayed as the worst disease ever, Covid itself. But clearly much of this was from isolation. 

Certainly the isolation of telecommuting is not as bad as that imposed by some lockdowns. In the country where I was living people were allowed out only three days a week and even then with a curfew and with not only masks but face shields to effectively make person-to-person interaction outside the home difficult or impossible. We also had to rub our feet on alcohol mats to prevent the dreaded shoe bottom-to-shoe bottom transmission. But it’s isolation nonetheless and post-COVID telecommuting has indeed been associated with causing mental problems or exacerbating pre-existing ones. Likewise for physical ones. (READ MORE: Why Do Conservatives Fear ‘Frankenflesh’?)

And surely a lot of people who think they prefer telecommuting have actually just become accustomed to it and need a shove back into the saddle.

As to the “Dinosaur” article from Microsoft Media mentioned above, it relied on the lazy journalist’s ploy of building an argument around a single “expert” as chosen by the writer. (In recent years, this has fallen in popularity behind articles about a single TikTok video and more recently “We asked ChatGPT….” ) 

That one expert, Cary Cooper, is  an organizational psychologist at the University of Manchester and author of “Remote Workplace Culture.” He told Business Insider that insistence on bringing employees back to the office was “appalling,” a symptom of antiquated management strategy, “dinosaur management of the highest disorder,” “micromanagement of the highest order,” and such employers “don’t understand the marketplace for talent.”

“They’ll lose talent. And they won’t be able to recruit good people,” he said. “That brand is going to be tarnished,” he said. People will say ‘I’m not even going to apply for a job there because they want me in five days a week.”

Mind, it’s Sir Cary Cooper, and neither I nor probably anybody reading this has been knighted. So we’ll give him that. But there’s nothing in his background to indicate he’s ever managed people and he’s not an economist; he’s a psychologist. 

Further, psychologists and psychiatrists are overwhelming left-wing.

One survey of 23 medical disciplines found that while two-thirds of surgeons were registered Republicans, at the other end of the scale a mere 24 percent of psychiatrists were, just beating out one other type of medical professional — infectious disease specialists. Yes, the WHO and CDC types who want to rule the world through disease. Psychologists, without the discipline of medical school, are much more left-wing. An earlier survey found only 6 percent identified as conservative.

Sometimes political inclination doesn’t matter. And sometimes it does. There are authoritarians on both political wings, but it was leftist authoritarians who urged the lockdowns and it follows that they will support any and all vestiges of the panicidemic, from muzzles (er, masks) to telecommuting.

Leftists also tend to be against Big Business. So when employers say it’s more efficient to have workers actually show up, psychologists, being leftists, will tend to side against employers because … they’re employers.

But what do the data show?

A 2023 study by three economists at different institutions but published by Stanford found workers perceived their productivity was about 7 percent higher at home, while managers thought it was about 3.5 percent lower. In fact, the Stanford analysis of multiple studies found a 10 percent to 20 percent reduction in productivity.

The global warming cabal is infamous for exclaiming, “It’s worse than we thought!” then later going silent when the prediction date comes and goes without change, much less disaster. But sometimes things truly are worse than we think.

Again, there are lots of cases where telecommuting is a win for all sides and other cases. I happen to be on the other side of the planet from most of the people I write for, and 35-hour commutes are rather tiring and expensive to say the least. 

But ultimately, if the boss wants workers back, that’s pretty much the end of it. Do they have an agenda? Yes. It’s called “higher productivity.” And it happens to include the mental and physical health of their workers. (READ MORE: Biden’s Fuelish Hydrogen Giveaway)

Studies show even slave owners realized that maintaining the health of their unwilling workers was beneficial economically, often providing some health care for their slave investments, and employing doctors to check on slaves’ health and give them any needed medicine. Owners also established slave hospitals, as the health of slaves was essential to plantation economies. Granted that slavery is hardly ideal for mental health and there were certainly slave owners who sacrificed economic efficiency for sheer brutality. And here goes: For the record I am not praising the institution of slavery. Nor do I eat babies.)

Call your boss a “slavemaster” if you will, but he does have a pecuniary interest in your well-being.
Those counseling a New Normal of telecommuting have an agenda, as well. It’s just not quite as obvious.

Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, journalist who has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Sunday Times, National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary,  Forbes, and many other publications.