Friday, January 04, 2008

Should governments back homeworking?

Technology site Fiberevolution certainly thinks so. "Why not give tax incentives to companies that institute homeworking?," he says. "I mean, just that would probably cut carbon emissions by a measurably more significant amount than any polluting vehicle taxation scheme. If on average every one in a five days, every employee in France with a job that can be performed remotely (motsly office jobs) did so, and assuming this was organised as to be evenly spread over the week, we'd cut carbon emissions by at least 20% just like that. Simply because - even though you wouldn't have 1/5 of employees not taking their cars - people who would be taking their cars would take less time to get to work because there would be less cars on the roads." He goes on:
"And honestly, how hard is that to do? The infrastructure for run of the mill remote working is already in place. Sure, you can't do video-conferencing, you can't do collaboration work efficiently, all that because DSL is limited. But you can work remotely for most of the stuff that needs to be done. And more importantly, as a business, you can pave the way for a new, more efficient and cheaper work organisation that you will be able to expand when the right infrastructure is there. Sometimes I wonder what these politicians have in place of brains. The simple solutions just seem to slip them by and they will favour complicated and often inefficient schemes. I'm not saying there always is simple solutions, but in this case, if you give the businesses incentive to do so, they will embrace new work organisation because it's in their interest..."

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