Divisions of labour: essays on the organisation of work

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically upended previous working arrangements. According to the Office for National Statistics, a whopping 47% of working adults in the UK did some paid work at home in April 2020 during the national lockdown (ONS 2020). Far from some momentary blip, working-from-home (WFH) looks likely to become the new modus operandi for many office workers.

Despite this, there has been almost no writing on WFH within mainstream political theory. There is an emerging philosophical literature on paid work (Appiah 2021) and economic policies such as universal basic income (Bidadanure 2019). However, it is noteworthy that most of this literature focuses on standard forms of employment.

Even rare exceptions to this, such as the EU-funded project 'Justice at Work' (Universitat Pompeu Fabra 2021), still neglect WFH. My research, which falls within the field of analytical political theory, will fill this gap by offering a novel conceptual and normative analysis of WFH.

My main research question is the following: How, and on what basis, should governments regulate working-from-home? In order to answer this overarching question, I will pursue three sub-questions: 1. What are the non-monetary goods and bads associated with working-from-home? 2. What would a free market approach to working-from-home look like, and what is its initial intuitive appeal?

3. Why would a free market approach to working-from-home be defective?

For my first sub-question, I am keen to document how the shift towards WFH alters the relative balance of the non-monetary 'goods' and 'bads' of paid work (Gheaus & Herzog 2016). This information could help firms to improve the nature of WFH for their employees. For example, the UK trade union Prospect has called for a ban on the use of surveillance technology such as webcams to monitor employees throughout the working day (Prospect 2021) - would this be desirable?

My second and third sub-questions offer a normative analysis of WFH, which is urgently needed. Initially, it might seem plausible that in a liberal society, individuals should ceteris paribus be given the opportunity to choose where to work, including the choice of whether to work-from-home. In this way, a 'free market' approach to WFH is intuitively appealing since it supposedly maximises workers' autonomy.

I will argue against this free market view, examining three powerful objections which each have profound implications for how governments should regulate WFH.

My research has the potential to be highly significant for policy. In the final chapter of my dissertation, I will assess how UK and EU policymakers should amend existing legal frameworks around WFH in light of my normative analysis.

My PhD dissertation will build on my 30,000-word master's thesis on the same topic. My background in political theory is chiefly in the analytic tradition; I have experience reading philosophical texts closely, unpacking key concepts, and undertaking detailed argumentative analysis. To facilitate the writing of my dissertation, I will attend academic conferences, read online journals and use resources in the university's libraries.

I intend to use the research method of reflective equilibrium, which I am familiar with and will have already employed in my master's thesis. This is a deliberative process whereby a political theorist goes back and forth between a set of normative principles and their own considered convictions, either revising the principles or their convictions until there are no further discrepancies between the two; John Rawls famously relied on reflective equilibrium when attempting to derive principles of justice from the so-called 'Original Position' (Rawls 1971).

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