Remote work

The term remote work became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic that forced the majority of office and knowledge workers to work from home. Prior to that, the practice of working full days from home or somewhere nearer to home than the office, was largely known as telecommuting.^[1]

The term telework has been commonly used as a synonym for telecommuting, but the 1973 originator of both words, Jack Nilles, intended the latter to mean any substitution of technology for travel to and from the office. Thus, he described telecommuting as one form of telework.

Many terms, have been similarly confused over the years. These include remote work, distributed work, work-from-home(WFH), mobile work, agile work, home working (primarily used in the U.K.), smart working (primarily used in the U.K.),flexible work, work from anywhere, hybrid work, and others.

The confusion in terminology is not simply a matter of semantics. Many have very real labor law and tax implications.^[2]

History[edit]

In the early 1970s, technology was developed that linked satellite offices to downtown mainframes through dumb terminals using telephone lines as a network bridge. The terms "telecommuting" and "telework" were coined by Jack Nilles in 1973.^[3][4] In 1979, five IBM employees were allowed to work from home as an experiment. By 1983, the experiment was expanded to 2,000 people. By the early 1980s, branch offices and home workers were able to connect to organizational mainframes using personal computers and terminal emulators.

In 1995, the motto that "work is something you do, not something you travel to" was coined.^[5] Variations of this motto include: "Work is what we do, not where we are."^[6]

Since the 1980s, the normalization of remote work has been on a steady incline. For example, the number of Americans working from home grew by 4 million from 2003 to 2006,^[7] and by 1983 academics were beginning to experiment with online conferencing.^[8]

In the 1990s and 2000s, remote work became facilitated by technology such as collaborative software, virtual private networks, conference calling, videotelephony, internet access, cloud computing, voice over IP (VoIP), mobile telecommunications technology such as a Wi-Fi-equippedlaptop or tablet computers, smartphones, and desktop computers, using software such as Zoom, Webex, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Slack, and WhatsApp.

In his 1992 travelogue Exploring the Internet, Carl Malamud described a "digital nomad" who "travels the world with a laptop, setting up FidoNetnodes."^[9] In 1993, Random House published the Digital Nomad's Guide series of guidebooks by Mitch Ratcliffe and Andrew Gore. The guidebooks, PowerBook, AT&T EO Personal Communicator, and Newton's Law, used the term "digital nomad" to refer to the increased mobility and more powerful communication and productivity technologies that facilitated remote work.^[10][11][12]

European hacker spaces of the 1990s led to coworking; the first such space opened in 2005.^[13]

In 2010, the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 required each executive agency in the United States to establish policy allowing remote work to the maximum extent possible, so long as employee performance is not diminished.^[14][15][16]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of workers began remote work for the first time.^[17] Cities in which the population of remote workers increased significantly were referred to as Zoom towns.^[18] According to a U.S. Labor Department study published, millions of Americans ceased working from home by 2022, and the number of employers reporting teleworking decreasing to the level before pandemic levels. From August to September 2022, approximately 72 percent of private-sector businesses reported little to no telework among workers, compared to roughly 60 percent from July to September 2021.^[19] In 1996, the Home Work Convention, an International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention, was created to offer protection to workers who are employed in their own homes. During the Information Age, many startups were founded in the houses of entrepreneurs who lacked financial resources.

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Make Money Fast

Make Money Fast (stylised as MAKE.MONEY.FAST) is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter created in 1988 which became so infamous that the term is often used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam, or in Usenetnewsgroups. In anti-spammer slang, the name is often abbreviated "MMF".

History

The original "Make Money Fast" letter was written around 1988 by a person who used the name Dave Rhodes. Biographical details are not certain, and it is not clear if this was even the person's actual name. The letter encouraged readers of the email to forward one dollar in cash to a list of people provided in the text, and to add their own name and address to the bottom of the list after deleting the name and address at the top.^[1] Using the theory behind pyramid schemes, the resulting chain of money flowing back and forth would supposedly deliver a reward of thousands of dollars to the ones participating in the chain, as copies of their chain spread and more and more people sent one dollar to their address.

According to the FAQ of the net.legends Usenet news group, Dave Rhodes was a student at Columbia Union College (now Washington Adventist University), a Seventh-day Adventist college in Maryland, who wrote the letter and uploaded it as a text file to a nearby BBSaround 1987.^[2] The earliest posting to Usenet was posted by a David Walton in 1989, also using a Columbia Union College account. Walton referred to himself as, "BIZMAN DAVE THE MODEM SLAVE", and referred to "Dave Rhodes" in his post.^[3] The true identity of Dave Rhodes has not been found. A supposed self-published web site by Dave Rhodes was found to be fake.^[4][5]

The scam was forwarded over e-mail and Usenet. By 1994 "Make Money Fast" became one of the most persistent spams with multiple variations.^[6][7] The chain letters follow a rigidly predefined format or template with minor variations (such as claiming to be from a retired lawyer or claiming to be selling "reports" in order to attempt to make the scheme appear lawful). They quickly became repetitive, causing them to be bait for widespread satire or parody. One widespread parody begins with the subject of, "GET.ARRESTED.FAST" and the line, "Hi, I'm Dave Rhodes, and I'm in jail".^[8] Another parody sent around in academic circles is, "Make Tenure Fast", substituting the sending of money to individuals on a list with listing journal citations.^[9]

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The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Holmes enters the office of Mawson & Williams, 1893 Illustration by Sidney Paget inThe Strand Magazine
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Genre(s)	Detective fiction short stories
Published in	Strand Magazine
Publication date	March 1893
Chronology
← Preceded by The Adventure of the Yellow Face Followed by → The Adventure of the Gloria Scott

"The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk" is one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is the fourth of the twelve collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in most British editions of the canon, and third of eleven in most American ones (owing to the omission of the "scandalous" "Adventure of the Cardboard Box"). The story was first published in the UK in The Strand Magazine in March 1893,^[1] and in the US in Harper's Weekly in the same month.^[2]

Synopsis[edit]

Pycroft meets Arthur Pinner, 1893 illustration by W. H. Hyde in Harper's Weekly

A young clerk, Hall Pycroft, consults Holmes with his suspicions concerning a company that has offered him a very well-paid job. Holmes, Watson and Pycroft travel by train to Birmingham, where the job is initially to be based, and Pycroft explains that he was recently made redundant from a stockbroking house. He eventually secured a new post with another group of stockbrokers, Mawson and Williams, inLombard Street in the City. Before taking up the job, he was approached by Arthur Pinner, who offered him a managership with a newly established hardware distribution company, to be based in France.

Pycroft is sent to Birmingham to meet Pinner's brother and company co-founder, Harry Pinner. He is offered a very well-paid post with £100 in advance, and is asked to sign a document accepting the post, and is also asked not to send a letter of resignation to his current employers. He immediately commences his duties, but he is concerned about the unprofessional aspects of the business and their sparse offices, as well as the suspicious fact that the two Pinners have a distinctive gold filling in their teeth in the same place, suggesting that they might be the same man.

When the trio arrive at the office, on Corporation Street, Birmingham, with Holmes and Watson presented as fellow job-seekers, Pinner is reading a London newspaper and is clearly in shock. As they leave, he attempts suicide, but Watson is able to revive him. Holmes concludes that the story of the brothers is a fabrication and that there is only one 'Pinner'; lacking enough men to make their attempt to deceive Pycroft convincing, Pinner had attempted to pose as his brother to make up the numbers in the hope that Pycroft would dismiss the similarities between them as a family resemblance. He further deduces that the whole point of the exercise was to obtain an example of Pycroft's handwriting so that a 'fake' Pycroft may be employed at Mawsons (hence why they asked him to not officially resign his post). Mawsons was keeping a vast stock of valuable securities, and 'Pycroft' was to be a safebreaker.

From the newspaper, they learn that Mawson & Williams have suffered an attempted robbery, but that the criminal had been captured, although the weekend watchman has been murdered. Beddington, the forger and cracksman, was the miscreant, masquerading as Pycroft, and his brother was masquerading as Pinner. American railway bonds worth nearly £100,000 were taken, together with a large amount ofscrip in mines and other companies, but the police recovered them from the thief.

As the police are called to arrest 'Pinner', Holmes observes that "Human nature is a strange mixture, Watson. You see that even a villain and murderer can inspire such affection that his brother turns to suicide when he learns that his neck is forfeited".

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45% of full-time U.S. employees worked from home

According to a Gallup poll in September 2021, 45% of full-time U.S. employees worked from home, including 25% who worked from home all of the time and 20% who worked from home part of the time.^[20]

In 2020, 12.3% of employed persons, including 13.2% of women and 11.5% of men, in the European Union who were aged 15–64, usually worked from home. By country, the percentage of workers that worked from home was highest in Finland (25.1%), Luxembourg (23.1%), Ireland (21.5%), Austria (18.1%), and the Netherlands (17.8%) and lowest in Bulgaria (1.2%), Romania (2.5%), Croatia (3.1%), Hungary (3.6%), andLatvia (4.5%).^[21]

In 2021, in the US 91% of people who work from home said they would like to continue to work remotely in the future. In Gallup's September 2021 study, 54% of workers said they believed that their company's culture would be unchanged by remote work, while 12% believed it would improve and 33% predicted it would deteriorate.

Gallup found in February 2023 that, among remote-capable employees in the U.S., 20% worked on-site, 28% exclusively remote and 52% hybrid.^[22]

According to the United States Office of Personnel Management, in fiscal 2020, 50% of all U.S. federal workers were eligible to work remotely and agencies saved more than $180 million because of remote work in fiscal 2020.^[23]

In 2023, economist and telework expert Nicholas Bloom said about a third of all working days are remote, slashing corporate real estate expenditures, and up from 5% before the pandemic.^[24] Bloom believes quickly progressing technology has facilitated and will continue the trend, but drawbacks for some kinds of positions will remain.

Potential benefits[edit]

Cost reduction[edit]

Remote work can reduce costs for organizations, including the cost of office space and related expenses such as parking, computer equipment, furniture, office supplies, lighting andheating, ventilation, and air conditioning.^[25] Certain employee expenses, such as office expenses, can be shifted to the remote worker, although this is the subject of lawsuits.^[26]

Remote work also reduces costs for the worker such as costs of travel/commuting^[27][28] and clothing.^[29] It also allows for the possibility of living in a cheaper area than that of the office.^[30]

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Common types of work found in work-at-home schemes include:

Common types of work found in work-at-home schemes include:

• Stuffing envelopes.^[2] The victim sees a flyer advertising a job stuffing envelopes, with "up to 1,000 envelopes a week that you can stuff... with postage and address already affixed!", offering a payment of $1–2 per envelope. To apply for the job, the victim is required to send a self-addressed stamped envelope for information and a small processing fee. In return, the victim is sent a template for the flyer they had originally seen; the envelopes they stuff are from other people who answer the flyer, and the payment is the processing fee.^[2]
• Assembly of items of some type, such as crafts, jewellery or medical equipment. The worker is required to pay upfront for materials and construction kits, and when they attempt to sell the finished products back to the scheme's organizer they are told that the products "don't meet our specifications", leaving the worker with assembled products and no buyer.^[2]
• Processing medical claims. The worker pays several hundred dollars for medical billing software, but will later discover that most medical clinics process their own bills, outsource their billing to established firms rather than individuals, or have stricter requirements than the purchased software can provide.^[2]
• Forum spamming. Usually advertised as some variant of "email processing", the worker is simply given instructions on spamming online forums and told they can make money by selling these same instructions online.^[2]
• Money mule, where the victim is required to receive and cash the fraudulent check and send back part of the proceeds and keep the other part. This is money laundering and will get the victim in trouble with the bank as well as with the law, as the check bounces (where the victim is liable for the bounced check) and can and often does lead to prosecution.^[4]
• Re-shipping, where the victim is required to receive the merchandise (often high-priced merchandise such as iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, or Pixel smartphones) purchased with stolen credit cards (or picked up at carrier service centers or retail stores such as Best Buy), then ship them eventually overseas, usually to Eastern Europe. The package may be re-shipped to multiple U.S. addresses before leaving for the scammers. The victim is usually in it for about a month, after which their communications with the scammers cease. The victims are usually never paid and lose money, often as a result of paying for shipping supplies, and usually further victimized with identity theft but are generally not prosecuted unless a warning from law enforcement is ignored. This type of scam usually occurs during the winter holiday season.^[5]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, work-at-home schemes, as well as victims affected by such schemes, were extremely common.^[6]

Some advertisements offer legitimate forms of work that really do exist, but exaggerate the salary and understate the effort that will have to be put into the job, or exaggerate the amount of work that will be available. Many such ads do not even specify the type of work that will be performed. Some similar schemes do not advertise work that would be performed at home, but may instead offer occasional, sporadic work away from home for large payments, paired with a lot of free time. Some common offers fitting this description are acting as extras,mystery shopping (which in reality requires hard work, is paid close to minimum wage, and most importantly, does not require an up-front fee to join) and working as a nanny.^[7][8][9]

Consequences

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Work-at-home scheme

A work-at-home scheme is a get-rich-quick scam in which a victim is lured by an offer to be employed at home, very often doing some simple task in a minimal amount of time with a large amount of income that far exceeds the market rate for the type of work. The true purpose of such an offer is for the perpetrator to extort money from the victim, either by charging a fee to join the scheme, or requiring the victim to invest in products whose resale value is misrepresented.^[1]

Overview[edit]

Remote work schemes have been recorded since the early 20th century; the earliest studied "envelope stuffing" scam originated in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1920s and 1930s.^[2] In this scam, the worker is offered entry to a scheme where they can earn $2 for every envelope they fill. After paying a small $2 fee to join the scheme, the victim is sent a flyer template for the self-same work-from-home scheme, and instructed to post these advertisements around their local area – the victim is simply "stuffing envelopes" with flyer templates that perpetuate the scheme.^[2] Originally found as printed adverts in newspapers andmagazines, variants of this scam have expanded into more modern media, such as television and radio adverts, and forum posts on the Internet.

In some countries, law enforcement agencies work to fight work-at-home schemes. In 2006, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) established Project False Hopes, a federal and state law enforcement sweep that targets bogus business opportunities and work-at-home scams. The crackdown involved more than 100 law enforcement actions by the FTC, the Department of Justice, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and law enforcement agencies in eleven states.^[1]

Home-based business and remote work are a legitimate avenue for employment, but anyone seeking such an employment opportunity can be scammed by accepting home employment offers from individuals or unknown companies. A 2007 report in the United States suggested that about 97% of work-at-home offers were scams.^[3] Many legitimate jobs at home require some form of post-high-school education, such as a college degree or certificate, or trade school, and some experience in the field in an office or other supervised setting. Additionally, many legitimate at-home jobs are not like those in schemes are portrayed to be, as they are often performed at least some of the time in the company's office, require more self discipline than a traditional job, and have a higher risk of firing.

Common types of work found in work-at-home schemes

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