Home-Office Debate Isn’t New
‘A Big Brother-like overreach,” fumed the American Electronics Assn. “An outrageous extension of the Washington bureaucracy into the lives of working men and women across America,” charged House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). “Simply foolish,” agreed Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.).
Thus did a firestorm of criticism envelop a recent ruling by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that placed the home office under the same health and safety standards as any other workplace. The OSHA advisory letter made employers liable for the working conditions of telecommuters, much to the chagrin of those, like a Fairfax, Va., proprietor of a small marketing firm, who asserted, “My workplace is no one’s business but my own.” Faced with such outrage, Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman quickly caved. By Thursday, she was merely calling for a “national dialogue on the subject.”
But we’ve had that dialogue: It has been going on for more than a hundred years. At the turn of the last century, America was the world leader in an industry, not unlike that of the Internet, that valued salesmanship, product innovation and long hours of dedicated work. In an ever-changing market, hard-driving entrepreneurs found it easy to set up shop and tap into a huge pool of consumers, many of whom shopped at new, fixed-price department stores. Naturally, many start-up businesses relied on home production because of its flexibility, low overhead and willing supply of workers, largely women with young children.
These were the garment trades, out of whose thousands of shops and factories came a stream of colorful, fashionable and inexpensive dresses, hats, gloves, pants, and shirtwaists, enough to make turn-of-the-century U.S. residents the best clothed in the world. But this cornucopia came with a high price: low wages, long hours and unsanitary working conditions. Pressured by ferocious competition, entrepreneurs moved the most time-consuming manufacturing tasks--hemming seams, sewing buttons and making lace--into crowded tenements, unsafe lofts and isolated farmhouses.
Reformers called this kind of “industrial homework” sweatshop labor, because it was inherently unhealthy and poorly paid. It bred child labor, self-exploitation and filthy living conditions. Florence Kelley, Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt all campaigned for the regulation, or, when possible, for the abolition of such home production. “We not only want a fair wage for the workman,” declared the National Consumers’ League, “but sanitary quarters for them also.” As one reformer declared, “The state cannot afford to sink knee deep in evil for the sake of a fur cape on the shoulders of a society belle.” In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act, of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, banned outright much home production; in 1972, OSHA further extended the government’s right to regulate a safe and healthful working environment.
But businessmen and manufacturers ridiculed such reform efforts from the start. In 1900, garment manufacturers and cigar firms dependent on home production used language almost identical to that of today’s Internet capitalists to denounce even the most timid government efforts to regulate such work. “A man’s dwelling place is his castle,” declared New York opponents of a law prohibiting home production of cigars. Antisweatshop laws were “unconstitutional,” railed the makers of buttons and artificial flowers when the New Deal first sought to prohibit children from joining their mothers at the kitchen table. Just as today, these petty capitalists found plenty of hard-pressed mothers to complain that without the right to take their work home, they would have to leave the kids unattended.
Telecommuting entrepreneurs will undoubtedly claim it is absurd to compare the working conditions of a computer-literate home worker in the exurbs to the grinding labor of a tenement-house sewing-machine operator on the Lower East Side in New York City. But it is not the character of the technology alone that determines the well-being of the workers or the level of their wages. When today’s computerized homebodies find themselves with a pain in their wrist, fatigue in their neck or a crick in the lower back, the cause is remarkably similar to that of their sweatshop ancestors: inadequate equipment, self-exploitation and overwork.
These are some of the reasons that our health and safety standards, as well as contemporary labor law, apply to all employees--including telecommuters. So as we open a dialogue about the workplace of the future, let’s not leave behind the advances of the past. These include the guarantee of decent work in an environment that nurtures the worker instead of destroying the soul.
