经济学人阅读｜扉页文章 Office politics

09.13｜经济学人阅读｜扉页文章 Office politics

经济学人The Economist是一份英国的英文新闻周报，分八个版本于每周五向全球发行，编辑部位于伦敦，创办于1843年9月。

经济学人是一本综合性新闻评论刊物，有商业、国家和地区、经济和金融、科学和技术五大类。其中文章文风紧凑且严谨，对语言精准运用，展现出一种克制的风趣幽默，常运用双关语调侃。

经济学人对于英语考试的重要性不言而喻，其文章常常出现在雅思托福、SAT、GRE、GMAT、考研英语、四六级、MTI和CATTI的阅读理解真题中。

今天羚羊君（公众：aa-acad）给大家分享的是经济学人2020年9月12日期刊中扉页文章的第一篇：Office politics。

这篇文章主要论述了疫情导致员工在家上班，办公室被迫闲置的情况。笔者认为办公室上班终将被远程办公取代。政府应拥抱远程办公的新技术，而不是强迫员工前往办公室。

想要阅读往期内容，可以在公众号右下角点击"更多资讯-长文阅读"进入专栏。

01

Office politics

办公室政治

Most people associate the oce with routine and conformity, but it is fast becoming a source of economic uncertainty and heated dispute. Around the world workers, bosses, landlords and governments are trying to work out if the oce is obsolete—and are coming to radically dierent conclusions (see Brieng). Some 84% of French oce workers are back at their desks, but less than 40% of British ones are. Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, says the company’s sta can work from home “forever” but Reed Hastings, the founder of Netix, says home-working is “a pure negative”. As rms dither, the $30trn global commercial-property market is stalked by fears of a deeper slump. And while some workers dream of a Panglossian future without commutes and Pret A Manger, others wonder about the threat to promotions, pay and job security.

大多数人将办公室与常规工作联系在一起，但是办公室正迅速成为经济不确定性和社会激烈争执的来源。在世界各地，工人，老板，房东和政府都在努力弄清办公室是否已经过时了，并且得出了截然不同的结论。法国约84％的办公人员回到了办公桌前，但在英国回到办公室的不到40％。Twitter负责人杰克·多尔西表示，该公司的员工可以“永远”在家工作，但Netix的创始人里德·黑斯廷斯表示，在家工作是“纯粹消极的”。随着公司对办公室的态度分歧，人们对价值30万亿美元的全球商业地产市场的担忧进一步加剧。有些员工梦想着没有考勤没有经理监督的庞罗斯式的未来，也有一些人对晋升，薪资和工作安全感到威胁和忧虑。

02

The disagreement reects uncertainty about how eective social distancing will be and how long it will take before a covid-19 vaccine is widely available. But it is about more than that: the pandemic has revealed just how many oces were being run as relics of the 20th century, even as it triggered the massadoption of technologies that can transform white-collar work. As a result the covid calamity will prompt a long-overdue phase of technological and social experimentation, neither business as usual nor a fatal blow to the oce. This era holds promise but also brings threats, not least to companies’ cultures. Instead of resisting change, governments need to update antiquated employment laws and begin reimagining city centres.

分歧反映出，人们对于社会隔离程度以及疫苗普及的时间并不确定。还不止于此：这次疫情揭示了许多20世纪建造的办公室仍在被使用，尽管这些办公室里大规模采用了可以改变白领工作的科技成果。结果，这场灾难性的疫情使技术和社会实验不得不延迟，办公室既不会照常运营，也不会对办公室造成致命打击。这个时代充满希望，但也带来威胁，不仅是对公司文化的威胁。政府不应该抵制变革，而应该是更新过时的就业法并开始对城市中心进行重新构想。

03

Two hundred years ago steam power brought workers to factories where they could use new machines. As corporate giants emerged in the late 19th century, sta were needed to administer them. They held planning meetings and circulated memos, invoices and other paperwork to record what they had done. All this required workers to be close together and created the pattern of people commuting by car or train in order to meet in a central oce.

This system always had glaring shortcomings, some of which have become worse over time. Most people hate the hassle and expense of commuting, which eats up over four hours a week for the average American worker. Some dislike the noise and formality of oces, or suer from discrimination within them. Ofce-bound workers nd it harder to look after their children, a growing issue as more families have two working parents.

两百年前，蒸汽机将工人带到使用新机器的工厂。 随着大企业在19世纪后期出现，需要对员工进行管理。给员工们举行了计划会议，并散发了备忘录，发票和其他文书，以记录员工的所作所为。所有这些都要求员工们要生活在一起，并创造了人们乘汽车或火车上下班的交通方式，以便在中央办公室开会。

但这个系统一直有些明显的缺点，随着时间的流逝，其中一些缺点变得越来越严重。大多数人讨厌通勤的麻烦和花费，通勤对于普通的美国工人来说每周要花费四个小时。有些人不喜欢办公室的声音和形式，或者不喜欢办公室内部的歧视。在办公室工作的员工发现照顾孩子变得更加困难，随着越来越多的家庭中，父母都在职，这一问题就变得日益严重。

04

You might think that new technologies would have shaken up this unsatisfactory status quo. After all, the pdf electronic document was born in 1991, the cost of bandwidth collapsed in the 2000s, and Zoom and Slack, two rms whose technology powers remote working, are both nearly a decade old. Yet inertia has allowed the oce to escape serious disruption. Before covid-19 struck, for example, exible-oce companies (including the troubled WeWork) had a tiny global market share of under 5%. Most businesses were unwilling to switch wholesale to remoteworking technologies before their clients did; or to write o sunk costs in the form of property assets and leases.

您可能会认为新技术会动摇这种不令人满意的现状。毕竟，pdf电子文档仅诞生于1991年，带宽成本在2000年代暴跌，而Zoom和Slack这两家公司的技术为远程工作提供了技术支持，它们都已经有近十年的历史了。然而，惯性使办公室得以避免严重的打击。例如，在新冠疫情出现之前，联合办公室的公司（包括陷入困境的WeWork）在全球市场中所占的份额很小，不到5％。在客户采用远程工作技术之前，大多数公司都不愿意就使用这种技术。或以不动产资产和租赁的形式写下沉没成本。

05

Covid-19 has upended all this. Before the pandemic only 3% of Americans worked from home regularly; now a huge number have tried it. Even Xerox, a rm synonymous with oce printers spewing unread pages, has many of its sta working from home. As more people adopt remote-working technologies there is a powerful network eect, with each new customer making the service more useful. Together Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and Cisco Webex now have well over 300m users. Bureaucratic hurdles to remote work have been blasted out of the way. Civil courts are operating remotely. Notaries have gone online and some banks have eliminated the need for new customers to enter a branch to conrm their identity and open an account.

新冠疫情颠覆了所有这一切。疫情之前，只有3％的美国人定期在家工作。而现在有很多人都尝试过在家工作。甚至是Xerox，这是一家打印未读页面的公司，它的许多员工都在家工作。随着越来越多的人采用远程工作技术，这将产生强大的网络效应，每个新客户都将使服务变得更加有用。微软Team，Zoom，Google Meet和Cisco Webex共同拥有超过3亿用户。政府工作也开始远程办公了。民事法院开始远程运作。公证人可以线上进行，一些银行已经不再需要新客户进入分支机构来确认其身份并开设账户。

06

How much of this change will stick when a vaccine arrives? The best available guide is from countries where the virus is under control. There the picture is of an “optional oce”, which people attend, but less frequently. In Germany, for example, 74% of oce workers now go to their place of work, but only half of them are there ve days a week, according to surveys by Morgan Stanley. The exact balance will depend on the industry and city. In places with easy commutes more workers will go to the oce; megacities with long, expensive journeys may see fewer.

当疫苗出现时，疫苗能给社会造成多少改变？最好的参照物来自已经控制住疫情的国家。那里的人们“可以选择自己的办公室”，但这样的并不多。例如，根据摩根士丹利的调查，在德国，现在有74％的员工去办公室工作，但其中只有一半的员工每周会去办公室五天。这种平衡将取决于行业和城市。在交通方便的地方，去办公室的员工就会多。但如果是大城市，交通堵塞且昂贵，那么去办公室的人就会很少。

07

Companies will have to adapt to this pattern of sporadic attendance in which the oce is a hub, not a second home. There is a risk that over time a rm’s social capital erodes, creativity ags, hierarchies ossify and team spirit fades, as Mr Hastings fears (see Business section). The answer is more targeted sta interactions, with groups gathering at specic times to refresh friendships and swap information. New technologies that “gamify” online interactions to prompt spontaneity may eventually supersede the stilted world of Zoom. As they retool their cultures rms will need to rejig their property: sober investors expect a reduction of at least 10% in the stock of oce space in big cities. With the typical corporate lease lasting at least half a decade, this will take time to play out.

公司将不得不适应这种零星的出勤模式，在这种模式中，办公室是枢纽，而不是员工的第二个家。正如黑斯廷斯先生所担心的那样，随着时间的流逝，企业的社会资本会受到侵蚀，创造力的下降，阶层的僵化以及团队合作精神的淡化。解决方法是更有针对性的员工互动，在特定时间聚集的团体可以增进友谊并交换信息。将在线互动“游戏化”以促进自发性的新技术最终可能会取代Zoom的功能。当他们调整文化时，企业将需要调整其资产：聪明的投资者会将大城市的办公空间存量至少减少10％。由于典型的公司租约至少五年，这些优势需要时间才能发挥出来。

08

For governments the temptation is to turn the clock back to limit the economic damage, from the collapse of city-centre cafés to the $16bn budget shortfall that New York’s subway system faces. Britain’s government has tried to cajole workers back to the oce. But rather than resist technological change, it is far better to anticipate its consequences. Two priorities stand out.

First, a vast corpus of employment law will need to be modernised. Already the gig economy has shown that it is out of date. Now new prickly questions about workers’ rights and responsibilities loom: can rms monitor remote workers to assess their productivity? Who is liable if employees injure themselves at home? Any sense that white-collar workers are getting perks will create simmering resentment in the rest of the workforce.

对政府而言，他们十分希望可以时光倒流以减少经济损失，从城市中心咖啡馆的倒闭到纽约地铁系统面临的160亿美元预算缺口。英国政府试图劝说员工回到办公室。但是，与其抗拒技术变革，不如预见其后果要好得多。这其中有两个优先事项。

首先，将需要对大量的雇佣法进行现代化修改。零工经济表明旧的雇佣法已经过时了。现在有关工人的权利和责任的新问题迫在眉睫：企业是否可以监视远程办公的员工以评估他们的生产效率？如果员工在家中受伤，谁应该负责？白领获得的津贴会让其余的劳动力不满和怨恨。

09

The second priority is city centres. For a century they have been dominated by towers lled with swivel chairs and tonnes of yellowing paper. Now complex urban-planning rules will need a systematic overhaul to allow buildings and districts to be redeveloped for new uses, including ats and recreation. If you step back into the oce this month, sit down and log on to your computer—but don’t get too comfortable.

第二要务是市中心。一个世纪以来，市中心一直被装有转椅和大量黄页的塔楼所占据。现在，复杂的城市规划规则将需要进行系统的检修，以允许将建筑物和地区重新开发以用于新的用途，包括休闲和娱乐。如果您本月回到办公室，请坐下并打开计算机，但不要感到太舒服。

经济学人一般目录大纲：

The world this week：简单梳理本周的时事Leaders：社论，对本周热点事件进行评论Briefing：简报，对一个特定热点话题深度讨论Letter：读者来信，对往期文章的评论Sections：各大洲及中美英三国的本周热点事件报道Business：商业新闻Finances and economics：财经新闻Science and technology：科技新闻Books and arts：文化书籍，书评和文化现象讨论Economic and financial indicators：商业及财经指数

Buttonwood：金融专栏Schumpeter：商业专栏Bartleby：职场专栏Bagehot：英国专栏Charlemagne：欧洲专栏Lexington：美国专栏Banyan：亚洲专栏