Lo staff irlandese di TikTok teme di diventare “genitori assenti” poiché oltre 200 petizioni contro il ritorno a pieno titolo in carica

This is an obvious way to save redundancy money, extremely profitable tech companies have found a very cost effective loophole that needs to be shut down. 

Pre covid, the majority of people who wfh now whether fully or partially, worked in the office.

Then covid happened – the only way for these businesses to remain operational was to let people work from home.

Then covid went away (largely) and a lot of employers want staff back in offices for a variety of reasons. The reasons themselves don’t overly matter – if your contract says the place of work is an office, thats where the place of work is.

Some people dont want to return to the office as they’re not living where they once did, others don’t want the commute and associated expense, others don’t want the childcare costs, others just want a better work life balance.

The majority of people do whats required to perhaps justify wfh at least partially. However there’s a cohort of workers that take the absolute piss. I’m sure each of us can recount a recent memory of being on a call and either a screaming creche/pre school kid is wailing or a primary school aged child wanders past the screen. That still happens. Working from home doesn’t mean save on creche/child minding fees and mind them yourself.

Similarly, pre covid, the vast majority of people working in Dublin lived within a relatively comfortable commute distance. Now, i have colleagues living in Cork, Clare, Limerick, Carlow, Galway, Sligo, Monaghan, Cavan who are faced with a horrible commute on the 10 days a month they need to come to office. They claim better work life balance, sure it is, you live elsewhere for cheaper whilst bringing in your Dublin wage. Sign me up. There’s talk about “renegotiating” contracts for those who don’t want to make the commute from their new base. I’ve heard anywhere from 20-40% haircuts to change to a fully remote contract.

Were all people before covid absent parents? Or is being an “absent parent” the most newsworthy headline to make it get traction?

I know I’ll be on the unpopular end of this but if they were told this 2 months ago why didn’t they start looking for alternative roles if this wasn’t going to work for them?

A company can do whatever they want when it comes to office/hybrid/remote. Pre 2020 we were all in offices 5 days a week, I’m not saying that was right or wrong but everyone managed to make it work then.

Your commute is not your company’s problem, you decided to live 2 hours away and still work in Dublin.

Again, I know I’ll be in the minority on this but maybe it’s because I don’t have kids 🤷‍♀️ also interesting to note that those who have spoken out in the article are mothers, no word from the dads 😂 (I’m joking, I’m sure there’s men who have signed the petition too).

In relation to the neurodivergent employee, that’s more complex… having gone through a process similarly in an old job (as the mean HR person at the table) there’s more to it than a simple yes or no, but I hope he gets sorted

Of all the things people are willing to boycott companies for having an inflexible WFH policy that screws workers should be right up there as a justification in most people’s mind to boycott.

I’ve had people argue that they can’t return to full time back to the office because “My dog will get lonely at home”

There should be some restriction on this – like, if you’ve employed someone who wfh in Longford for a couple years, you shouldn’t be able to suddenly demand they travel to Dublin 5 days a week. That’s blatantly unreasonable, and especially in a housing crisis. It’d take me a year to sort that out, and it does disproportionately affect parents who are also dealing with the crisis in childcare.

It’s not easy to just move house. And it’s not easy to find new childcare. 2 months is not enough runway.

So they are kind of admitting that they will be not be fully engage with work when their kids are at home.

The heart bleeds for those poor TikTok workers. Best of luck to the valiant 200.

Rest assured that all the Irish workers who commute hours daily to offices/schools the country wide are hoping they win their right to sit at home in their jocks, drinking cups of tea and filtering out shit content for the M50 faithful. Such noble intent.

This is shite for a number of reasons. There’s a fair middle ground to be found for staff to work hybrid.

But bringing everyone into the city is just a complete pain. the traffic, the public transport, can’t handle it.

The impact on peoples lives, kids, the climate, all shite.

Hybrid and flexible working has to have strong safe guards in law.