Employees and advocates have reacted with alarm and anger to a former M&S and ASDA boss’s claim that working from home is not proper work.
Lord Stuart Rose, a life peer and retail tycoon, told BBC One’s Panorama that working from home has hurt productivity.
Work-from-home employees and groups have lashed back, arguing that working from home, which boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic, promotes flexibility and accessibility.
Work From Home Hub founder Kat Rutter said: “Just give people the ability to do their best work from wherever they want.
“What does it matter to Lord Rose or Lord Sugar or anyone else?”
A number of large London-based employers have a return to full-time office working in recent months.
However, Rutter argued that Rose’s comments were borderline discriminatory to mothers who need to balance work and childcare.
She said: “This is someone who could afford to pay someone to look after their children.
“So they have no real consideration for what working people need to do.”
As a working from home advocate, Rutter said that she received a huge number of messages from upset and offended home-working employees.
One message read: “The anti work from home push is about control and dominance.”
Another concerned worker said: “Ridiculous views from Lord Rose.
“He completely disregarded the challenges around children.”
Rutter argued that many people can enter the workplace by working from home who otherwise may have been excluded.
She said: “I’m working with a lady at the moment, she’s in a wheelchair.
“There is no way that she’d be able to work unless the office or the workplace that she was going to was hugely adapted for her”.
Rutter also suggested that some businesses were using return to office mandates to save themselves the trouble of making redundancies.
She said: “Say, for example, and your organisation is no longer making the money that it was making during the pandemic and you need to make some redundancies.
“The cheapest way to do that is to force people back to the office.
“Because those people are quite rightly saying, I’m not going to come back and get back and work in the office for you.”
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