The billions of people around the world are not able to go to their workplaces for more than three months now. The majority of them are working from their homes. Coronavirus has restricted them in their homes and now people are working from homes via the internet.
Like climate change, coronavirus is also a natural problem yet socially driven. Dealing with both Covid-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce non-essential economic activity. For climate change, this is because if you produce less stuff, you use less energy, and emit fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The epidemiology of Covid-19 is rapidly evolving.
But the core logic is similarly simple. People come in contact with each other and spread infection. This happens in households, and in workplaces, and on the journeys people make. Reducing this contact is likely to reduce transmission from a person to another person and lead to fewer cases overall.
The world feels awfully strange right now. This not because everything is changing so fast and any one of us could become a victim of the virus at any time or could already be carrying the virus and not know it. It feels unusual because the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. Maybe we are never going back to normal again. But we are definitely going to have a new ‘normal’, where everything will be changed.
The present crisis has also highlighted what work is necessary for society to meet its needs. Conversely, it has exposed some work as superfluous and even pointless, from a social perspective. While work might be important for the purposes of creating profit for some individuals, it need not be vital for creating the opportunity for the majority in society to live healthy and meaningful lives.
As there is a lockdown, measures are being taken to contain the impact of COVID-19, many employees are not just doing their jobs but transforming their job routines. Coronavirus is eliminating the tasks that some employees normally do. There are no clients to consult, no trips to book, no students to teach, no concerts to perform and organize, no products to deliver, no new data to input. Unemployment is only one of the many effects of COVID-19 on work and workers.
Now with governments and companies around the world looking to ease lockdowns, minimizing virus transmission at work is the top priority of the organization’s agenda. A shift from commute-based work to work from home is causing a significant in the health of the environment. Yet the growing ranks of workers now practicing their trade online using tools like Zoom and Slack are taking their own toll.
It is noteworthy that the technological infrastructure that supports our online video streaming, searching, and music playing leaves a large carbon footprint of its own. By some estimates, data centers and the networks that connect them produce as much carbon pollution as the aviation industry that is about 2% of the world’s total.
by: Abeer Arshad
Tags: working from homes
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