A significant majority of federal government workers are complaining that they are being required to show up to work instead of being allowed to work from home, as they have been allowed to do for five years now.

A new article from Fortune via Yahoo News explains why private businesses are requiring employees to show back up at the office; the reasons are the same for government work, and are summarized below:

1. It is much better for young workers to show up in-person so they can learn from senior employees. It is also much better for social skills.
2. It is hard to coordinate work when the workers aren’t at the same location. 
3. A study shows that a lot of employees aren’t actually working a full day when no one is watching. (Who would have known that?)
4. Productivity is lower when no one is watching. 

Remote government work also greatly harmed small businesses, bars, and restaurants in places like D.C. where their volume of business dropped as federal employees were allowed to work from home.

Remote learning has been especially harmful to poor children, and children who were already behind. This was also easy to see. Think of a poor single mother or father trying to make sure their children were getting online and paying attention.

Attendance also dropped after the remote learning experiment:

Virtual learning detrimental to school attendance, especially in districts with higher poverty rates, study finds

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of chronic absenteeism have nearly doubled across the nation for students in kindergarten through grade 12.

This increase was tied to the mode of instruction during the early years of the pandemic. In particular, schools that employed virtual learning as the primary teaching mode during the 2020-21 school year experienced a greater increase in chronic absenteeism in the following year. That increase was significantly greater in school districts with higher levels of poverty, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame.

If public schools are trying to make a case for how necessary they are, they’re not doing a very good job.

Thank goodness for a president who is willing to shake things up and demand efficiency.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.