Technical jargon: What does "home office" actually mean?

Agreed, you hardly like reading this word anymore. Nevertheless, it's worth giving it some thought. Why has it suddenly become socially acceptable to work from home again and what are the dangers behind it?

Of course, there were already reasons for working from home instead of individual or open-plan offices before the current crisis. Nevertheless, there was little movement for a long time. Until before the lockdown, home offices and the associated flexible working time models were not an option for many employers and managers. These models were often argued away on the grounds that performance and efficiency would suffer as a result. It was more about the fear of losing control. But employees were also afraid of losing a healthy balance between their private and business lives, which prevented them from making concrete demands. Nowadays, this fear has disappeared in many places. But caution is advised, as a look at the history books shows.

Revival of working from home

Homework has a long tradition in Switzerland. In eastern Switzerland, the Zurich Oberland and the Jura, for example, people have been embroidering, weaving and screwing at the kitchen table or in weaving rooms and workshops in villages and on farms for centuries. It all began in the 15th century, when the income from mercenary work dried up. Interestingly, this system was called publishing in the textile industry. And it worked like this: merchants in the cities (publishers) would contract out cheaply purchased raw materials and labor to individuals, mainly women and families in the countryside (homeworkers). The publishers then resold the finished products with lucrative margins. Work was carried out without a contract and was usually paid in kind in the form of medicines or food. When the economy weakened, there was less work and fewer francs per item. It used to be called an economic miracle at the kitchen table. Today it's called working from home. Let's hope that the ancestral model of working from home by legally self-employed workers who are in reality completely dependent on the publisher and underpaid is not taken out of the drawer again.