On 08/02/2012 19:00, Cynic wrote:

Sure - and *for you* it might work out OK. The problem facing
employers is that as soon as they permit one employee to work from
home, they are pretty much obliged to allow other employees to do the
same.

Um, no. Not even slightly. I work from home, a couple of other
colleagues do, the rest aren't allowed to.

It is an unfortunate fact that whilst some people (and you may be one
of them) are able to discipline themselves to do the same amount of
work at home as they do in the office, the majority of people will not
do anything like the same amount of work unless it is something that
can be monitored pretty much continuously.

People have found the opposite in many cases - the work/life boundary
gets blurred the other way round, and many people working at home put in
rather more time than they would at the office.

In order to allow working from home for most jobs, it is necessary for
an employer to pay in accordance with actual work done rather than a
fixed salary - and that change leads to all sorts of problems for both
employer and employee.

No. Experience says that doesn't need to happen. Performance is measured
in the same way as for a normal office worker, and apparent
underperformance dealt with in the same way.

The biggest issue is that the only way to
measure "work done" in many cases is to look at "results achieved".
Which is tough luck on the salesman working from home who has spent a
solid 8 hours a day all week following up leads that didn't result in
a single sale, or on yourself who has spent a week writing a
particularly difficult specification that gets paid the same as a spec
that you can knock out in a day.

Your premise is wrong, therefore your deduction is wrong too.