Only a few months ago, Science — America’s leading scientific journal — published an op-ed saying that scientists and scientific institutions need to be even more political than they already are. Now, Nature — Britain’s leading scientific journal — has published a very similar one. (To my knowledge, neither journal has published any article recently making the opposite case — though I’m happy to be corrected if wrong.)
Anyway, the Nature op-ed gets off to a bad start. The author, Eric Reinhart, trots out the well-worn claim that the US spends more on healthcare than other rich countries but has higher mortality. He attributes this to “market-based ideologies” and “system-wide failure”.
What he doesn’t mention is that most of the mortality gap between the US and other countries is due to factors unrelated to the healthcare system. Americans are fatter, they get into more traffic accidents, and they have a habit of shooting one another. Once you adjust for these factors, Americans live about as long as expected. Plus, the main reason they spend so much on healthcare is that they have more money to spend.
Incidentally, I’m not saying there’s nothing to criticise in the US healthcare system — just that Reinhart’s framing is tendentious.
And what of his main argument? “The real crisis,” he notes, is not that public health has been politicised. “It is that it has not been politicised nearly enough.” You read that right — “not nearly enough”. Later on, he declares that we must “aggressively” politicise public health.
Remember when 1,000 ‘experts’ signed an open letter supporting BLM protests in the middle of a pandemic — on the grounds that “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue”? Or when a group of virologists dismissed the possibility of a lab leak despite one of them writing in private that it was “so friggin’ likely”? Reinhart apparently doesn’t consider this level of politicisation sufficient.
He says “there can never be an apolitical approach to public health”. But this is hardly a deep insight. There can never be an “apolitical” approach to any field that relates to politics, but that doesn’t mean such fields should be politicised — a different concept. While public health scientists are perfectly entitled to their political views, they ought to keep them separate from the science itself. In the two examples above, they didn’t do this.
The fact is that public health, along with other areas of science and medicine, became highly politicised during the pandemic and the Great Awokening — which has led to a dramatic loss of trust among political conservatives.
The charts above show the percentage of Americans who have “a great deal” of confidence in the scientific community (left) and the medical community (right), broken down by party. Since 2018, Republicans have become far less confident in the scientific community and somewhat less confident in the medical community. Meanwhile, Democrats have become more confident in both groups.
Such polarisation can’t be a good thing for America. And Reinhart’s solution is: double down. He complains about the Trump administration’s “dismantling of public-health systems” without asking why so many Americans might support such a policy in the first place. Could it be that they see public-health systems as… politicised?
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Soon to be replaced by workers in other countries. If it can be done remotely, you don’t need a British passport for it.
This has been repeatedly raised, yet so many are ignoring it.
Or algorithms running on a server somewhere.
Even if not replaced abroad there’s plenty of cheaper UK locations than anywhere HSBC is currently based where people will be happy to take on these roles remotely.
Call centres are not renowned for length of service awards. With just natural wastage all those 1,200 jobs could be located overseas in less than five years.
I wonder how many will extract a commercial rate for premises and facilities. Or will there be yet another weak roll-over – to capital and its predations, whilst unions just ‘Tut’?
They’re laughing all the way to the bank. £300 a year to turn a room in your house into an office? How much does that extra room cost per year?
They will all be happy to do it, until they are told their pay is being frozen. When are the councils going to start claiming business rates from these people? If your home is a place of ‘work’ then the rates should be applied. Have the H&S visited all the home ‘offices’ to ensure they are ‘Covid Secure’? An injury at home when working is the responsibility of the employer!
Not only is the home COVID secure there will be insurance implications for both the homeowner and company.
There are also GDPR and other privacy concerns with people working from home, many not on a VPN, with other adults able to look over shoulders at screens and access clients personal information.
And the next step, of course, is to gradually offshore these jobs!
I’ve been involved in the outsourcing of accounts functions to India. Each one has been a disaster because management have failed to calculate how much efficiency is added through communication with people you are sat next to. In one case they brought the entire function back into the UK, and in the other two a small team was created in the UK to carry the teams in India.
However, if you get the employees in the UK to prove it can work, make them work remotely, and work out how those inefficiencies can be overcome, then …
Waiting for colleagues to get around to responding on whatever chat app they’re currently ignoring is a total nightmare vs a quick chat over the top of the desk.
I’m anti-social at the best of times but there’s no way I’d choose to work from home 100% of the time.
HSBC UK the next bank to go under. Customer Service is overlooked until its too late, there is seldom any going back. Bloody fools.
Customer service is so 20th Century and bloody fools they certainly are.
I’m pretty sure there are insurance/liability issues to working from home 100% of the time. The reason I know this is a former employer restricted our wfh for this reason.
A friend of mine who works for a large, solid multinational was concerned last summer that the next step after the home office would be an even more intense shift of these home offices to countries in the 3rd world.
This week, they got news of a major restructuring in that direction and British redundancies to come because of that.
Next step: Britain becomes the third world
When I worked for a big multinational company about ten years ago we were all offered the opportunity to become home workers if we wanted to – with laptops and mobile phones it made it much easier to do so – anyway, all you had to do was apply to work from home and that was that – you got lots of help setting up your ‘work station’ at home etc and quite a lot of people leapt at the opportunity to work from home and not have to come into the office anymore except for the odd important meeting which wasn’t very often or if they preferred they could just join-in via a conferernce call and number provided. I was tempted to work from home myself but held back for a little while to see how others found the experience – I’m glad I did really because the initial novelty of home working quickly wore off for many homeworkers who were steadily starting to regret their decision – among many things they would complain about was for example feeling they were being ‘left out of the loop’ etc when important decisions were made and they didn’t get to hear about or were the last to know, they found trouble getting assistance when they were struggling with their work, they complained of feeling isolated and had no one to talk to about their work related problems and complained that their ability to contact someone quickly about an urgent problem could be lengthy and troublesome – when they worked in the office they could usually discuss their work issues almost immediately face-to-face with someone who could usually help there and then and the problem could be resolved almost immediately rather than it taking hours, days or sometimes even weeks to resolve where homeworking was concerned … but most of all many homeworkers say that they missed the office comradery … that cohesiveness that made them feel connected with the rest of the workforce which you just cannot form working home alone.
Things may have changed today but evidently I decided back then not to work from home.
I decided that it was much healthier to (try at least) keep work and homelife as seperate as possible.
All part of the reset to benefit giant corporations