Sunday 29 August 2021

Your occasional reminder that Jacob Rees-Mogg is a twat

Mirror editorials are usually wide of the mark (to the left, of course), but they've nailed it this time:

Labour blasted top Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg today after he suggested any "ambitious, driven” Brits should stop working from home. The Commons Leader, whose £5m house is a five-minute walk from Parliament, reignited the row over Tory ministers demanding employees get back to their desks...

So far so stupid...

Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner, the Shadow Future of Work Secretary, said:

“This is an insult to the millions of working people who have worked effectively from home throughout this pandemic. Jacob Rees-Mogg should check the manifesto that he was elected on in 2019 which committed the Government to flexible working."


This 'digital hermit' applauds Ms Rayner.

15 comments:

JuliaM said...

Yes, much as I loathe her, she's right.

Rich Tee said...

I can't go back to the office as they won't let me. I don't even have my own desk anymore.

Shiney said...

Agree.... sort of.

Rayner is a TUC/public sector shill and will be calling for the 'right' to work from home. Rules which'll mainly apply to the local authority pen pushers and be a disaster for most small businesses.

WFH is not very productive when trying to make stuff you can drop on your foot.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JM, I don't know enough about her to loathe her.

RT, are you OK with that?

Sh, don't drag Rayner into it. Whether people WFH is none of her business, neither is it any of Rees-Mogg's business. It's something which (hopefully) the private sector can sort out for itself.

(Personally, I have no intention of commuting in ever again, but everybody can decide for themselves, I don't know what's best for other people).

Penseivat said...

"Hello, is that ..........plumbers? This is Mrs Rayner. I have a serious water leak in the attic. Could you send someone round to fix it please?"
"Following Labour party guidelines and TUC instructions, all our staff are working from home. I can arrange a zoom meeting where you can be told how to fixing the leak. The normal hourly rates will still apply."
What could go wrong?

Shiney said...

@M

Rees-Mogg is a twat I agree and should STFU.

As you say there is a 'contract' between the employee and the employer... unless you are self-employed. WFH may be good for either or both and so is up for negotiation in said contract.

I didn't 'drag' Rayner into it.... she did that herself. And I maintain that she IS a shill for the public sector unions (see below) who have/are campaigning for flexible working 'rights' making it more difficult for small businesses in the private sector who have to deal with the ever increasing shit that gets handed down.

So she should also STFU.

From he Wikipedia bio...

"During this time, she was also elected as a trade union representative for Unison. She was later elected as convenor of Unison North West, becoming the union's most senior official in the region."

M

Shiney said...

@P

HA HA Ha.... Exactly.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PS, I'm sure that such plumbers will swiftly go out of business, so the markets will sort it out.

Sh, the Labour Party was founded as the political wing of the TU movement. There's no secret about that. Calling them 'shills' is like criticising Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, for being terrorist sympathisers.

The Labour Party's support has declined the same as TU membership, which is barely existent in the private sector any more, so by default, Labour is the party for public sector workers nowadays (making it fairly irrelevant to the normal person, I agree).

Shiney said...

@MW

Agreed - but they both (the TUC and Labour) dress their statements and policies up as 'support for ordinary working people' when in fact it should be 'support for middle class lazy fuckwits on the government payroll'.

And it'd be OK if the flexible working rights they are after only applied to the public sector because everyone else would be able to see what a lazy bunch of arseholes they really are and would maybe vote for a party that would actually do something about the bloat - not that there is one such to vote for in the UK of course, the Torys having gone full-on blu-labour over the last few decades.

Penseivat said...

MW, "I'm sure that such plumbers will swiftly go out of business, so the markets will sort it out."
In a real world, probably, but it was meant to be a humourous example of the (sometimes) stupidity and tunnel vision of various politicans.
Anyway, one of JRM's arguments was that it is costing this government, i.e. the taxpayer, millions of Pounds a year to maintain buildings which may remain empty if Rayner gets her way. Still, we have to find somewhere for the thousands of illegal migrants landing at Dover to live.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Sh, just because I slag of the Tories doesn't mean I support Labour and vice versa.

PS, the sunk cost argument is nuts, see B's comment.

Lola said...

What all this probably proves is that millions of public sector 'workers' are already redundant. And I have an employee whose partner works for the local council and he says the same thing...

WFH has not worked for my business - all my people could not wait to get back into the office. Which is surprising as we are just the sort of business where you'd think WFH would be a winner. It might be that I try to make work fun (!) and generally our clients join in with that.

OTOH I 'worked from home' today - but I definitely wasn't as productive as I would have been WFTO. And I am motivated to be productive - I'm the Boss.

Bayard said...

"OTOH I 'worked from home' today - but I definitely wasn't as productive as I would have been WFTO. And I am motivated to be productive - I'm the Boss."

AFAICS WFH is a skill, just like many others that an office worker needs to learn. The potential for distractions for someone who hasn't learned that skill is enormous, as, I am sure thousands of people have found out the hard way over the last year and a half.

Lola said...

B. It's more subtle than that in my case. Every time I open up and start working on the lap top, the dog barks at me. When I shut it down he shuts up. (I work at the kitchen table).

Maybe he's on to something? Or trying to tell me something?

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, people and businesses are different. For some, WFH works better, for others it doesn't, for some it would be plain idiotic, like P's plumbers example. Each to his own.