Among the many transformations to people’s ways of living since the start of the global pandemic, none has received as much attention from the media as the increase in the prevalence of remote work. The World Economic Forum has observed that the opportunities to work remotely are not equally distributed: well-paid workers in “high-skilled” industries are more likely to work from home than their service-industry counterparts. So worrisome is this trend that economists have gone as far as to refer to it as a ticking “time bomb for inequality.”

The vast majority of workers have not moved to remote working. Both service-sector employees and those based in productive industries have, in most cases, continued to work on-site. Despite this fact, a disproportionate amount of media coverage has focused on remote work. One perhaps obvious explanation for this is that the people tasked with writing about workplace conditions are very often remote workers themselves.

Less clear within the reams of coverage that the media and policy think tanks have given to working from home is what this move augurs for the conditions of workers. Is remote work, as its advocates argue, emancipatory, or do the same forms of exploitation found in regular work continue to predominate?