Opinion: Workplace must change with economy

“My very first job I said thank you and please,

they made me scrub a parking lot down on my knees,

and then I got fired for being scared of bees,

and they only give me fifty cents an hour.”

Those John Prine lyrics, from his song “Fish and Whistle,” are a throwback to the workaday world a bunch of us old-timers grew up in. Work was hard and hazardous to your health — and, hey, my first hourly wage was 50 cents an hour too!

Times are changing and so is the workplace.

Thanks in part to the pandemic, we now realize a lot of white-collar work can be reimagined, and it is.

Not so much for the service workers, who still have to be physically on the job. But for a lot of office jobs that live and breathe on the internet, there are a whole lot more options available now than pre-pandemic.

Journalist and author Joanne Lipman recently wrote in Time magazine about “The Great Reopening” that’s now upon us as we emerge from the COVID shutdown.

“The workplace doesn’t work,” says the subhead to her article. “Now’s our chance to reinvent it.”

In her article, Lipman points out that the modern office was created post-World War II, using a military-style model that was “created by men for men, with the assumption that there is a wife to handle the duties at home.”

That’s made it tougher on women in the workforce, and this pandemic has spurred a growing realization that other models are far more do-able for working moms, two-income families and others who don’t have to be in the office to get their work done.

Plus, the pandemic fed into a growing frustration many have with their jobs as traditionally defined.

A Pew survey last January found that 66% of those who were unemployed were considering a career change. That must be a factor in the labor shortage many businesses are now facing; it’s not just extended unemployment benefits keeping people home, it’s also an overall reluctance to return to the same old dead-end jobs they had prior to the pandemic.

It all stacks up as an opportunity to change the 9-to-5, five-day workweek model into something that’s friendlier to our 21st-century lives.

Work has already become more integrated with our personal lives — for example, think about how often you check and reply to work emails at home — but now there’s an opportunity to reimagine office hours and work spaces in new ways. Instead of working in an office, a lot of people can work from anywhere now. And with office space becoming less important, fitness centers and child-care services could become more a part of our workplaces, with positive impacts on our physical and mental health, not to mention the overall health of our family lives.

There is also a danger to this reconfiguration of our workplaces — it “could devolve into a class system,” Lipman points out, where the rank and file continue to work rigid hours with not a lot of perks while management and their office help get to enjoy more flexible conditions. This nation is already divided down have-and-have-not lines, and the wrong kind of restructured workplace could exacerbate that.

Nevertheless, the economy is changing and the workplace had better do the same.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]