Americans are very compassionate people and our hearts were melted this week by the distress shown by Democrat Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois. The Governor’s state is apparently being overwhelmed by “migrants”, a.k.a. illegal immigrants. And he is begging the person he considers responsible to stop it. That person is strangely not President Biden, the man in charge of enforcing immigration policy in the U.S. Neither is it himself, the man who signed into law legislation in 2021 which expanded protections for immigrant and refugee communities and established Illinois as the most welcoming state in the nation for illegal immigrants.
No, the man who should be blamed is Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas! Pritzker explained why in a heartfelt letter he wrote to the Texan on January 12th. Abbott has been bussing Illegals to ‘sanctuary’ cities and states for the last year or so. Sanctuary states are defined as states where governments refuse to work with Federal Agencies to deport Illegals and provide various services to house and feed them. ‘Democrat-run’ is the shorter definition.
Pritzker’s plea to Abbott was an Oscar contender: “I plead with you for mercy for the thousands of people who are powerless to speak for themselves. Please… suspend your transports and do not spend more people to our state.” Abbott’s response was a little different and can be summed up as “Hell, No”, with his reasoning being “Until President Biden steps up and does his job to secure the border, Texas will continue transporting migrants to sanctuary cities to help our local partners respond to this Biden-made crisis.”
The scope of the problem for Pritzker lies mostly with Chicago. It has received 32,000 illegals since August 2022. Most of these came from Texas, which claims its illegals delivery service has transported 30,800 to Chicago in that timeframe. The cost to Chicago can be seen by its expenditure of $138 Million in just 2023 alone. Plus it has no space left to put the illegal immigrants, and is being reduced to using O’Hare Airport as a temporary internment camp and building “winterised base camps” (this being Chicago the only one to be built so far had to be closed down as it was on a toxic waste site).
Throw in a nasty winter for the northern parts of the U.S. and it looks like Pritzker may have a point. Unless, of course, you compare this with the situation in Texas. Figures from CDP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) show that the Biden Administration has let in nearly 11 million people into this country – nine million through border ports of entry and 1.7 million estimated ‘got-aways’ (those who did not bother stopping at ports of entry). Nearly all of these are economic migrants who are entering the country illegally, i.e., if you turn up at our borders you can enter the country without documentation only if you are a bona fide refugee. Of these about 45% enter through Texas. Since Texas has made the delights of Chicago available to illegal immigrants in August 2022, 2,081,485 folks have entered through Texas ports of entry plus a good portion of the ‘got-aways’. Pritzker is moaning about having to deal with 1% of the number facing Abbott. And Abbott also has to deal with the massive human trafficking that has overrun the Texas border, as well as the destructive amounts of fentanyl and active terrorists being smuggled in through an open border.
One feels you would have to have a heart of stone to read Pritzker’s plea for relief from his self-inflicted difficulties without laughing (apologies to Oscar Wilde).
Pritzker is not doing anything other than pleading of course. As a Democrat, his modus operandi is to complain about others rather than doing anything himself. But even if he pushed Illinois to get rid of all vestiges of being a sanctuary state the border would still be wide open and the ever-growing ranks of illegal immigrants would continue to swell. The real villain is of course Biden. Biden promised to throw open the borders in his campaign and he, or rather whoever is running the show in the White House right now, is delivering spectacularly on that promise.
For the remainder of Biden’s term as President we are stuck with a situation getting worse by the day. And it is becoming easy to see where this may all end this year. Pritzker’s problem of where to put illegals is starting to become a nationwide problem and we have all seen the beginnings of what housing and feeding 11 million (and counting) extra folks will actually mean.
Mayor of New York, Eric Adams, reports over 150,000 illegal immigrants have come to New York. He cannot blame Abbott too much as Abbott has only bussed 37,000 folks there. The rest have come in on the Biden Administration organised transport. He does not have the space and has been reduced to throwing kids out of their school in order to house illegal immigrants, who did not want to be in an Adams tent city in a rainstorm.
Democrat Governor Healey of Massachusetts has come up with another plan to deal with the illegal overload. A few months back Massachusetts shelters were all full with illegals as they are so sanctuary statist that they have a law that guarantees any homeless family access to emergency shelters. Her plan to deal with this was not, as you might expect, overthrowing said law, but was something a little more worrying. In the words of her Lt. Governor: “Most importantly, if you have an extra room or suite in your home, please consider hosting a family. Housing and shelter is our most pressing need and become a sponsor family.” Today’s suggestions have a nasty habit of becoming legislation with the Healeys of this world.
Even as little as five years ago, no-one would have forecast folks actually suggesting in the USA that your kids should be turfed out of their school building to provide accommodation to citizens from other countries. Equally, of course, they would not have forecast the half a trillion dollars being spent on the needs of non-citizen criminals (it being a criminal felony to enter the U.S. illegally), the horrible human trafficking that takes place on the border, the fentanyl plague that has hit the country hard and the serious terrorist threat we have so blithely let enter our borders.
Or as Biden’s team might say: “Job well done.”
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They should be in 5 days a week.
Sack them if they refuse.
The Civil Service requires massive downsizing.
What has where they work got to do with downsizing?
They’re a blob that needs draining.
I’m the first one to agree, just don’t know why their working location is relevant to conversations about the size of the civil service, or their willingness to carry out policies they don’t like.
I guess it’s relevant to the downsizing effort in the sense that any who refuse can be sacked. Perhaps with the added benefit that those who refuse are also likely to be the most ‘entitled’ of the bunch.
If I were put in charge of downsizing, I would be getting rid of the least productive people first, by looking at how much they produce per £ you pay them, rather than where they choose to work.
Tof – I agree with most of your comments, but on this we differ I employ you I decide where you work what time you start what time you finish, your smoke breaks etc.
Imo, wfh means that civil servants, famously inefficient to start with just sig around in their pyjamas logging on once every now and then trying to make money buying and selling on eBay.
They can all take a running jump as far as I’m concerned.
Where is your evidence for this?
As an employer I want to maximise what I get from my employees – there are trade offs involved in that. We are stakeholders in the civil service- I want them to be managed intelligently and to employ the best people.
The evidence is that the more of them there are the more England sinks into an economic abyss ergo they are badly managed, mostly doing pointless stuff inefficiently.
Oddly the land registry would seem to be a department that does a necessary job, although it could perfectly well be managed at county level and not from expensive premises in London.
We’re talking in this thread specifically about working from home vs office.
I agree about the land registry – could be even cheaper with smaller offices (for those that want them) and working from home…
You believe they “work” at home?
You believe the amount and quality of “work” they do from home is both monitored and is acceptable?
You believe that staffing in a Government Department is right in terms of competence and just-adequate numbers?
Wow.
How on earth would I know? How would you know?
My guess, based on my own experiences and from talking to others, is that in general the public sector puts less pressure on its employees and is more reluctant to discipline them, for many reasons not the least of which is that UK employment laws make all of this a right royal pain the behind. As to whether civil service productivity has fallen due to WFH, who knows? The “answer” is IMO better management, better incentives properly applied. All of you lot who are chirping about the lazy public sector probably didn’t think they were great BEFORE WFH, so just pushing people into expensive offices they don’t want to be in doesn’t seem like a very smart approach to dealing with the myriad problems of managing bloated organisations.
Civil Servants?
because lazy people springs to mind
I don’t think so
For how many of the strikers is home a flat share with four other 290-somethings?
“20-somehings”
Some of them. Why is that relevant?
I guess WFH is not so appealing when home is a crowded flat.
Possibly not. We provide an expensive office for those of our staff who prefer an office – I had assumed all the youngsters would want to come in, but many don’t. It seems to depend on many factors. I’m not convinced WFH is right for everyone but that’s for them to decide, as long as they do their work. I am glad we are able to offer choices without it affecting us negatively – it means we can retain good staff in a competitive market.
In what way is the Land Registry Office a ‘competitive market’?
I don’t remember saying it was.
To be clear, the “competitive market” I refer to above is the market for staff. Nobody works for free so filling any position involves some level of competing with other employers or alternatives so that the candidate chooses you. Better staff cost more money. Offering flexible working arrangements will probably allow you a wider choice of candidates, but of course you must decide whether your firm is able to offer that flexibility – if you are not then you may need to offer other things to attract people of the right quality – such as more money. Tradeoffs, to which the civil service is surely not immune.
While I am a traditionalist in many ways, and like to have people in the office, I do see how working from home has advantages as well as disadvantages. What I don’t appreciate is the ascendency to the new class of ‘laptop knowledge worker’, while others have to come to the office because thats where their work is. It has, through the times of madness created this group who feel distinguished and desirous of privilege, as superior to their office based colleagues. I would stipulate that they should be in the office Friday and Monday to prevent ‘weekend expansion’.
I’m looking forward to seeing how DOGE gets on in the US. I think a lot of the inefficiency of our Civil Service comes from the myriad of regulation that they have to comply with. Downsizing as it stands would just compound the problem. It needs speeding up, it needs simplifying dramatically. It will naturally reduce in size. More ‘Can do’ and less ‘Jobs worth’. Chronic inefficiency, sloth and waste are just baked in to it.
Why would working remotely cause “weekend expansion”?
Why do you “like to have people in the office”?
It’s simply a fact that lots of jobs can be done from anywhere, but yes let’s make everyone spend hours a day travelling just because some people can’t work from anywhere.
We’ve been round this quite a few times I recall, but lets go round one more time. This is my view.
Friday used to be known as ‘Poets Day’ (piss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday…). If you work from home, and Friday is the most popular day by far, its not to try and squeeze out the last bits of productivity from your week, it is to have a relaxed feck about day before the weekend. Come on, lets be honest with each other.
People in the office aids communication considerably, it also allows a sense of camaraderie, and common purpose which you can’t have if you aren’t there. It allows a degree of separation of work and life which you cant achieve any other way. An office at home isn’t a ‘work environment’ not if you are breaking of to set the washer going, or feed the dog.
From a management perspective it is easier to see the general dynamics of operations. It is easier to see the wellbeing of the individual, are they happy in their work, are they motivated.? Some staff are not work shy. They are very dilligent, and can end up working well into the evening, because no-one can see that they are struggling with their workloads. Managers are there to manage, not just load their staff up with work like pack animals. Being able to be face to face and socialise with colleagues makes ideas easier to propagate and develop as well. It also gives employees access to their managers, to talk, discuss, socialise, request… . Tell me you can get that from a Zoom call.
Travel time is dependent on where the employee chooses to live, and chooses to work. I know people who travel great distances each day, and that is their choice. They could work closer to home, or live closer to work, but that is their choice. I’m not responsible for them having a two hour commute. Their choice… Some of them use it as productive time, in reflection, to plan out their activities for the day, wind-down after a busy day, maybe make some calls, chat with family and friends to unpack their day. It doesn’t have to be dead time. Commuting into London might be a long-winded affair, but elsewhere in the country commutes aren’t anything like as long and tying. If it takes less than 30 minutes to drive to the office, then that excuse is pretty weak, imo.
I’m not denying that people can work successfully from home, some of the time, or for periods of time. I freely accept there is no one answer to this question, and thanks to lockdowns there will always be a demand for work from home, but if there was to be a default setting, then in my view on balance, Work in Office is preferable
Thanks for your comprehensive comments.
My experience has been very different – overall productivity is probably a bit better than pre-WFH, and communication is pretty good. We have taken on new people and trained them. Some employees have struggled but I think this is because they were always weak but they relied on others in the office and now they have to do their own work, they are more exposed. Perhaps my firm is an outlier, though other people I know who WFH are very diligent as far as I can tell.
Why does there have to be a “default setting”?
If I might cut the Gordian knot, I think you might accept that the flaw in this debate is that you appear to imagine that Civil Serpent bosses will manage their minions as effectively as I am sure that you do.
The answer might be the privatise Land Registry into two or more private companies who employ the minions and organise their employees as they see fit.
Not too difficult then for the adequacy and cost of the work carried out by different companies to be compared.
It would need an intelligent specification of what was required and how succes would be measured and properly monitored. That would probably be the stumbling block.
If there’s an issue, which there probably is, then it’s with incentives which feeds into management (and of course I think a lot of what the public sector does, it should not do). Focusing on “getting back into the office” seems like a distraction to me.
P.S. Being honest I take breaks, work permitting, at various times, but equally when there is work to be done or ideas are flowing I am online late in the evening or on weekends, days off. If I didn’t have that flexibility, which I feel I have earned after almost 40 days of porridge, I might have retired already. WFH has also reduced the incidence of people taking sick days at our place (not that we had a big problem with it before).
A good post, from my own experiences of working from home you gradually stop the learning you get from being at the coal face, you loose the contact of new ideas or subtle variations in technics that can improve you and your job. You become insular, existing and working with the knowledge and experiences of what you gained before with little opportunity to develop your skills and expertise, by external influences. In todays working environments things change too quickly, you need to be in the forefront, the office, the work place to keep up.
I would suggest that if you can work effectively from home then your job is a perfect candidate or the future use of AI and your replacement.
I suppose Office romances are a thing of the past when flirting is banned.
Yeah, working from home allows you to do food shopping. Don’t tell that doesn’t happen.
Also saves massively on transport costs and on child care costs.
Young children will also benefit from being with a parent at home rather than shoved in some dreadful creche.
But are our Beloved Civil Serpents capable of managing the amount and quality of work produced by their minions? Or might they just employ more minions to get work done and bloat their little empires?
The only civil servant I know is extremely bright, sceptical, self motivated and right wing. He is much more productive working from home and if forced to go the office he will just move to a much better paid job in the private sector. He has no intention of striking.
But yes by all means manage people by how many hours they spend in an office rather than by how much they produce.
sack them
Why not sack people based on the work they do rather than where they do it?
I think the issue is the work they’re not doing, while they’re doing the chores, watching TV, watching the kids, walking to dog etc.
Perhaps whoever is meant to be managing them should, er, manage them then?
Of course once this “battle” is won the Unions will mobilise their work forces to demand ‘work from home’ allowances. So, there will follow demands for heating and lighting supplements, telephones and associated bills and to be paid tax free. Next will be specialist equipment such as chairs and desks soon to be followed by modifications to the home for office space.
I have worked in the Civil Service and know exactly how these things progress.
Of all the many different types of people I have worked with civil servants are by an enormous margin the laziest
and skiving is an industry pastime. The good, honest people get nowhere and inevitably are ground down by the surfeit of mediocrity around them. The whole industry needs closing down just like our parliamentary system and rebuilding from scratch.
Why not give people an allowance if it means you need a smaller, cheaper office? That’s what we have done. The people working from home in our firm are actually subsidising the people who work in the office. But we don’t mind – we appreciate that different individuals have different priorities and we try to accommodate everyone as long as they work hard, which they do.
I agree with most of your points on this – bad managers will continue to badly manage, no matter where their teams are
Thanks!
I was very sceptical to begin with but have been pleasantly surprised.
Perfect. Would someone lock the door behind them?
Recently redrew boundaries on new house site. Somehow somewhere registered LR documents got it wrong by many metres. So boundary between 3 sets of houses has now to be revisited & solicitors involved. I can’t establish who & how it happened but as you can’t get any sense out of LR office, it’s a mighty hassle, expensive & long winded & I suspect LR error.
Recently an Ordnance Survey man came by with sat mapping (for new build mapping). He got boundary correct (ancient fence posts) & it agreed with original registered boundary.
When asked if it was possible to send it to LR office to correct new digital line currently registered wrongly he said no, different organisation. Made me quite cross.
At present the Land Registry do not answer customers queries on Fridays. So the logical conclusion is that they will go down to 3 days which is what they are fighting for.
As RUK have forecast the only way we will ever resolve the State mess is to sack them and rehire as a private company.
So fire them. See if we notice the difference.
Almost torture to have to work at all.
The under the Boris government the genius Goldmans trader showed that money grew on trees. Oh, oops.
The one I know does work very hard, from home. Does anyone here have any hard evidence that this has affected productivity?
AI will soon replace many white collar workers and the first to go will be those who themselves work through laptops from home.My advice would be to be in the office in person and make your physical presence essential to the organisation. https://www.businessinsider.com/fully-remote-wfh-workers-highest-risk-losing-jobs-ai-chatgpt-2023-12?op=1
The big question should be why do we needs lawyers and the Land Registry to buy a home. Given that many cars now cost more than a house but the title is transferred on a simple piece of paper registered at the DVLA, why do we need such expensive ways of purchase.
All unemployed should be able to work from home 5 days a week. Drain the swamp
I would have thought that the contract of employment would stipulate where and for how long the employee works. But knowing how lax the civil service is it probably doesn’t, having the civil service always understood employment to mean office based and x hours. If the former then home workers are in breach of contract and liable to the consequences.
I’ve been waiting for a decision from them for more than 18 months. WFH explains why the LR service and productivity is so appalling. How much longer will i have to wait?
“Motivated and hard working”? My old friend worked at the Land Registry. He told me that they were allowed ten days per year uncertificated sick leave – which they treated as ten extra days holiday.
Uncertified sick leave did indeed used to be treated as extra leave although in the last few years things have tightened up.
Last June i submitted an application to Land Registry to add my spouses name to the title of my house. I was quoted an estimated date of November 2025 for completion of this very complex and intricate process. I actually called LR to check if that was a mistake. It wasn’t.
They need some Victorian justice – a long spell in a pestilential prison.
One downside of working from home that I’m not sure they are aware of is that a study in the USA suggested that those who WFH get less promotions and as a result don’t progress so far up the pay scales.
This is because of the old adage “out of sight, out of mind”, with managers not seeing them so often it’s the ones they see in the office, putting in their hours that get the raises and the promotions.