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Working From Home: A Millennia-Long Tradition

The widespread view of this new wave of working from home is that it’s a revolutionary transformation in the way humans perform their labor. History teaches us that it is less a revolution and more a return to our historic roots.

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    Working From Home: A Millennia-Long Tradition

    Working From Home: A Millennia-Long Tradition

    The widespread view of this new wave of working from home is that it’s a revolutionary transformation in the way humans perform their labor. History teaches us that it is less a revolution and more a return to our historic roots.

    Take any historical period prior to the Industrial Revolution and it is marked by labor that is conducted in the home or immediate community. From the hunter-gatherers who prepared animals for food and clothing to the growing, grounding and baking of grains, it was all done without commuting to some distant workplace.

    This is similarly true for workers in the Middle Ages, in which the butcher, the baker and, yes, the candlestick maker all performed their work adjacent to or inside their homes. An example of this was the “longhouse” in England, which dedicated parts of the home to different uses: livestock at one end, family at the opposite end, and kitchen and work areas in the middle.

    It was the Industrial Revolution that began to change the way humans worked. Centralized factories required people to travel to their work. Even still, much of economic production remained in the hands of stay-at-home workers, like the farmer and tradesman.

    As the economy grew in sophistication, the rise of the administrative and service era led to office buildings where humans needed to work in close proximity to accomplish the tasks of a modern economy.

    Of course, working from home on a broad scale is only possible because of recent technological achievements, starting with the internet, wireless communications and cloud computing.

    Though it’s difficult to say with any certainty what the new working construct will eventually be (e.g., back to the pre-pandemic status quo ante; mix of office and at-home days; or full-on remote working), it is clear that change is afoot. Even before the pandemic, employers were moving toward more flexible work arrangements, highlighted by the increasing use of freelancers.

    Now that employers and employees see that congregating in a central office is not an absolute precondition to productive and collaborative work output, employers will likely find their own path to manage a workforce that has seen a new world of possibilities and flexibility in providing their labor.

    Please reference disclosures: https://blog-dev.americanportfolios.com/disclosures/

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