13 September 2024. 9/11 | Work

How 9/11 changed America // Return to Office mandates are about control. They’re likely to be counter-productive. [#601]

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish two or three times a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. A reminder that if you don’t see Just Two Things in your inbox, it might have been routed to your spam filter. Comments are open.

1: How 9/11 changed America

As the events of 2001 become more distant, the analyses at this time of year of 9/11 become more reflective. A longish review (partial paywall) of Richard Beck’s book Homeland in The New Review is a case in point.

Ed Burmila, the reviewer, suggests that America—and I’d say, by extension, the rest of us—has been living in the shadow of those events ever since:

He persuasively makes the case that we have lived for 23 years in the shadow of the burning Twin Towers and that almost no aspect of American life—economic, social, political, cultural—remains untouched by the collective trauma of 9/11 and our responses to it.

The book’s not short, at just under 600 pages. It spends less time than other 9/11 books on the events of the day, which are well covered elsewhere. To the extent that it does follow the day, it does it through re-living the television coverage, on perhaps the last moment when television provided a collective experience:

Beck’s use of transcripts and video from television coverage of the day, highlighting the confusion, the emotions, and the disbelief of the on-air personalities, recreates the experience of seeing it happen in real time... Beck recounts news anchors on the evening of the attacks reacting in speculation-heavy confusion as explosions rocked Kabul—explosions that turned out to have nothing to do with the United States or the terror attacks that morning.

The story of the impact of 9/11 on American life is told in the book through four inter-related crises that the attack either created or exacerbated. These are: increasing militarism; ‘skyrocketing xenophobia and racism’; economic; and of accountability.

I’m going to walk through each of these in turn.

Militarism

Although the effects of militarism on American foreign policy is more obvious, the more interesting impacts are at home, notably in the legitimation of surveillance culture. This extends into entertainment—think of the Batman movies—public space, and even the “lionization of the first responder”, which has in turn legitimated the increase in the power of US domestic law enforcement agencies.

Homeland finds the echoes of 9/11 everywhere and draws out the ways that paranoia and militant “security” posturing in our public space exacerbates, rather than reduces, fear. Whether discussing the fortress-like layout of the Ground Zero memorial or remembering how much we all loved a movie about a vigilante Good Guy who must use every cell phone in Gotham City to spy on the masses in order to keep them safe, Beck is not shy about dipping his toe in a lot of genres.

Xenophobia and racism

Xenophobia and racism have gone in hand in hand with increasing security. Burmila points out that the so-called “war on terror” has in effect been a war on Muslims, both Muslim Americans and Muslim countries elsewhere. Thus,

the incompatible messages from American leaders that Islam is a religion of peace yet every Muslim individual is inherently suspect. One need not look too hard at the politics of the U.S. (and most of Europe) over the past decade to see the logical end of that mindset.

Political economy

Burmila suspects that this was the starting point for the book, and Richard Beck acknowledges that it was his favourite part to write. He starts by dismantling the supposed economic arguments for the wars that 9/11 started—“the idea that corporate access to Iraqi oil resources somehow provided the decisive economic argument for invading Iraq”. These, he says, were more emotional than logical.

But when you get into an analysis of what happened and why, this has emotion at its heart as well:

Beck positions the U.S. of the 2000s as a hegemon in crisis—think of imperial Britain at the trailing edge of the Boer War—a fragile superpower more desperate to maintain appearances than to make rational investments of blood and treasure with expectations of future benefit. Interventionism, like nineteenth-century colonialism, transitioned from being an extension of American policy to the policy itself.

This is the heart of Beck’s book, says Burmila. It is a story of how America’s political and economic elites use 9/11 as an excuse, or perhaps a reason, to assert American hegemony over a world system that was becoming less in thrall to the United States. There’s a striking historical analogy in this part of the review:

The answer took me back to 1842, to the ignominious retreat from Kabul of the British Army—only a single man, a Dr. William Brydon, survived to reach Jalalabad out of nearly 16,000 people who embarked on the ninety-mile trek through enemy territory. It was a wound to early Victorian pride and British identity almost as severe as 9/11 was to modern Americans.

What Britain did in response was to assemble what was known even at the time as an “Army of Retribution.” This then marched to Kabul, levelled the city, and returned to India.

Afghanistan would be no more under British control or influence after the infliction of violence than before it. They did it because they were frightened, and angry, and in a vengeful mood.

Extending this to the Bush administration in the years after 9/11, Burmila says that Homeland provides a different frame for thinking about America’s response in the wake of 9/11:

it’s not that the Bush administration and its enablers believed they could win the game but that they were lying about what the game was altogether. Hegemony is a hell of a drug, and nations rarely behave rationally or find themselves persuaded by columns in a spreadsheet when attempting to hang onto it.

Accountability

There’s a long list here of people who escaped accountability for any of this:

Judith Miller’s poisonous reporting, Colin Powell’s legacy-killing pantomime show before the United Nations, the cartoonishly credulous and ugly rush to militaristic consensus, or the roaring cataract of lies from official sources on which the case for war was built.

Burmila says he didn’t learn anything much from this section, although it did make him want to throw something.

We are still living in the world that 9/11 made, and Homeland touches on how the response to 9/11 also abetted the rise of Donald Trump:

It is a world in which we rationalize which rights (usually those of other people) we are willing to trade for the illusion of greater security from a terrifying kind of threat we have seen and can never unsee.... there is little question that 9/11 still lives rent-free in our collective head.

---

2: Return to Office mandates are about control. They’re also counter-productive

Two British companies have racheted up the number of days they expect their employees to be in the office, according to a report in The Guardian. One is Santander, the Spanish-owned British bank; the other is PWC, the accountancy/ management consultancy business.

Both companies will now expect their employees to be working at home for no more than two days a week. In the case of Santander, that means at least three days in the office; in the case of PwC, three days either in the office or working at a client’s site.

Santander sent out a memo to staff explaining the change:

Santander’s memo said that working in person together from offices was “vital in supporting and developing our people, especially those at the earlier stages of their career”.

The bank’s chief executive, Mike Regnier, works from home in Harrogate at least one day a week and said that he wouldn’t have taken the job if he had to be away from his family five days a week.

(Meme courtesy of Reddit: r/CanadaPublicServants)

As for PwC, they told employees that they plan to track their employee ID badges to make sure they comply.

All of this reminds me of a couple of pieces that I earmarked for Just Two Things when I saw them earlier this year, but never got round to writing up. One is a short accessible article in tech.co, that rounds up the available evidence; the other is a paper by two academics at the University of Pittsburgh, who used a sample of larger US businesses to understand the impact of “Return to Office” [RTO] mandates, as they’re known in the States. There’s an open access version here.

At tech.co, Adam Rowe did a quickfire review of what we know about the evidence on RTOs, although it is necessarily impressionistic.

• ‘Over 33% of remote workers would leave their job if forced back to the office.’ This is UK data culled from LinkedIn and related sources.

• ‘40% of office workers report working longer hours when remote or hybrid’. Data from the NBER in the US found that people worked 48 minutes longer in a day spent working remotely. Though it’s not clear where this time comes from, some of it may be because they don’t have to do the commute.

• ‘RTO mandates negatively impact women’. There was a post-pandemic uptick in the level of female participation in the labour market, according to UK data. We’ve seen qualitative data from specific businesses that says that a greater proportion of women than men leave a business after an RTO mandate. (And everything that is true for women is more true for disabled people.) So you can argue that RTO mandates are discriminatory.

• ‘Remote-friendly companies show 16% higher revenue growth’. This is from research by those workplace radicals the Boston Consulting Group, who compared workplace policies with market performance. Correlation isn’t causation, of course.

• ‘80% of bosses regret pushing for RTO mandates’. This is based on a survey of a thousand US businesses. The bosses said they would have taken a different decision had their workplace data been better, which is damning at several levels.

• ‘Gen Z benefits the most from remote work’. This is an Irish study; more than 55% of 18-24 year-olds say that remote and hybrid work had a positive impact on their career (compared to 23% of 45-54 year-olds). This is interesting because this is exactly the same group that Santander says its RTO is designed to help.

The University of Pittsburgh paper by Yuye Ding and Mark Shua Ma tries to analyse formally the relationship between companies that have issued RTOs and their performance. They found that employee satisfaction levels fell, although this seemed not to have an impact on revenues and profitability.

This may not be right. As they say in a note on the limitations of their analysis:

we do not have a long-enough window to examine the long-term consequences to firm performance.

I recall, but can’t find the report, that employee satisfaction is a leading indicator of firm performance, so a decline in satisfaction now reduces future revenues and profitability, both for reasons of lower staff morale and higher staff turnover.

But they were damning about the motives for RTOs in US businesses. From the abstract:

Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.

The thing that I have noticed from lightly monitoring the companies imposing RTO mandates is that they come from a specific set of sectors: tech, finance, mining, consulting. These are sectors that are generally associated with more control-oriented management philosophies. (It’s perhaps not coincidence that the tech companies tried to move people back into the office at a time when their financial figures aren’t good.)

In other words, this is a replay of a long standing argument about Theory X and Theory Y, developed by Chris McGregor a long time ago. (I wrote about this at my Next Wave blog a few years ago).

Theory X? Humans are unwilling workers who need to be controlled and disciplined to get the most from them at work, Theory Y? Humans want to be fulfilled at work by management and systems get in the way. In other words, this is actually an argument about trust.

As Lindsay Kohler said in Forbes,

[I]t's easier to say that it's important for people to be onsite for the sake of maintaining culture than it is to tell your people that you don't trust them.

One of the other bits of evidence here is that senior people are more likely to leave in response to a Return to Office mandate, precisely because they can. But if the result of a business decision is to alienate your senior people and the GenZ employees who should be your future talent, it is likely to be counter-productive.

And as for Santander? I work for a virtual organisation, and there are lots of ways to “support and develop your people” in the early stages of their careers. Effective buddying systems and good mentoring are likely to be far more productive than ordering people into the office.

---

Other writing: Basho and the haiku

At my Around The Edges blog I wrote recently about the long walk of the Japanese poet Basho arpund Japan in the 17th century. On the way, he developed the Japanese haiku—the archetypal three line verse.

Basho’s book Narrow Road to the Deep North is about a 1500-mile walk up one side of Japan, across, and down the other side, towards the end of the 17th century. He was 45 at the time, but not ageing well, and he was mostly accompanied by his ‘disciple’ Sora. The roads were not good and there were potential dangers. His walk was intended to acknowledge his literary influences.

The haiku was an adaptation of another Japanese form, the longer tanka. It has a strict metrical form—five syllables is the first line, seven in the second, five in the third—but for many reasons is is hard to translate into English:

The haiku is more or less untranslatable into English, and this is not only because of the economy of the form. The translator of this edition of The Narrow Road, Dorothy Britton, explains that rhyme doesn’t really work in Japanese; that haiku is supposed to be ‘seasonal’, as in referring to the seasons, and that there’s a whole lexicon here to help the poet. The third point is that they are so compressed that they are always capable of ambiguity, and that this ambiguity is amplified by the large number of homonyms in Japanese.

More on all of this at Around The Edges.

---

j2t#601

If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.