It took a pandemic to unlock a transformation of the world of work that had been waiting for too long. But it is not because employers have finally heard the call for teleworking that technological progress, the evolution of society and environmental imperatives have been calling out to them for years that the matter has been heard and settled.
“My fear, with the film, was that we would arrive too late with our story about teleworking and that we would no longer find much interest in it. But we are still in the midst of changes in the world of work. There are a lot of questions that still don’t have answers. And a bunch of new questions that keep appearing,” says Julien Capraro, the researcher, screenwriter and director of the documentary, in an interview. Work differentlywhose world premiere will take place on Wednesday in Montreal, as part of the Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma.
Invented 100 years ago by people like Henry Ford, who needed to have all their employees in the same place at the same time, the typical work week — 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week — has continued to apply many years after the vast majority of us no longer worked in factories, but in offices, and several tasks could easily have been done from home. And even though people have been saying for a good 50 years that teleworking would be a good way to be more productive, to reduce road congestion and pollution, in addition to improving the quality of life of workers in an era of growing individualism, there was still only 3% of the working population teleworking (even if only one meager day per week) when the pandemic struck.
The main blockage came from the bosses, who, although they themselves allowed themselves to work remotely from time to time, did not trust their employees enough to let them escape their gaze. It is true that teleworking requires a profound change in their management style on their part. That is to say, moving from rather directive management, giving a lot of importance to the time spent in the office, to more collaborative management, based first and foremost on the establishment of deliverables.
Retrofuturistic humor
The documentary from the National Film Board of Canada, which will be available free of charge on the NFB website from 1er March, managed, in a little less than an hour, to bring through an impressive number of researchers, specialists, managers and workers who address an equally remarkable number of often neglected issues.
One of the challenges was finding real experts among the mass of so-called experts that appeared in the wake of the pandemic, says Julien Capraro, a journalist of French origin based in Vancouver who has already produced another documentary at the NFB, The last keyon the improbable encounter of Citroën’s legendary 2 CV with North America.
What could have been a very informative but somewhat boring documentary, with its parade of experts sitting in chairs, turns out to be surprisingly entertaining. In addition to its dynamic rhythm and its aesthetic borrowed from the era of the beginning of the personal computer, with its pastel colors and pixelated screens, it happily draws on old NFB films from the 1950s to 1970s to illustrate its point. . In addition to giving the technology a deliciously retro-futuristic flavor, this archival footage sometimes comes with editing and voice-over dubbing that has characters from the past saying all kinds of funny things.
Be careful ahead!
Just because teleworking is now part of our lives doesn’t mean we’ve finished debating it. For example, although we like to believe that it results in productivity gains, this may not always be the case.
For Jack Nilles, a former NASA engineer who was already carrying out experiments on teleworking in the early 1970s, teleworking will be a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to transport. But for Catherine Morency, an expert in personal mobility at Polytechnique Montréal, this may not be true if people take the opportunity to move away from urban centers and this leads them to buy more online and drive on larger distances to do their shopping and take the little ones to school.
And then, not all workers are equal when it comes to teleworking: it particularly benefits those who already have better salaries and working conditions, the documentary recalls. Store staff, warehouse workers and slaughterhouse workers benefit little from this transformation. The latter, on the other hand, will perhaps be avenged by another technological development which, this time, risks hitting harder those who are lucky enough to be able to work from home, suggests Julien Capraro in the credits of his film: intelligence artificial.
But that’s another story.