worked in open offices in London for ten years - would happily take a 10% pay cut to never do that again. The volume levels were through the roof, constant interruptions and - worst of all - the smell. Sandwiches, microwave meals and the constant undertone of sour milk as half finished cups of tea ferment in the collective body and computer heat. Always noticed that the Senior Managers had their own offices though.
 
The last place I worked 'evolved' into hot desking, because .. well fuck I don't know. So everything gets packed up every evening into a locker and the next day you work wherever there is space. Which is the same space everyday because human beings are like that. When my manager objected to my team 'constantly huddling in their own little cloister' I suggested (jokingly) that we randomly assign places every day. He actually sent out an all office email about it...
 
Marx was right. The aim of capitalism is to alienate workers from the products of their labour. You can blow sunshine up everyone's ass all day about how wonderful the company is and how amazing your products and services are. But if you are structurally committed to maximising efficiency (and reducing the effect of human needs, desires and behaviours from your bottom line), you end up treating people like furniture - and their human-ness like a problem that needs to be worked out of the equation.

Average wages for people between the ages of 18 and 35 have remained stagnant for nearly four decades.
In 1980, 78.9 per cent of all Canadians between the ages of 18 and 35 were employed in some sort of job, according to Statistics Canada. In 2016, it was 81.2 per cent.
In 1980, the average price of a house in Canada was $203,972.86 — or about six times average annual salaries, once adjusted to account for today’s dollar values, the Canadian Real Estate Association says.
By 2016, the average home price hit $506,760.01 — or 14.8 times average annual wages.

According to the Canadian Federation of Students, as many as 300,000 millennials were working in unpaid internships in a bid to further their careers by collecting relevant on-the-job experience, in 2016.
The issue with unpaid internships is that most millennials in those jobs are also working in another position, likely one that pays minimum wage, in order to make ends meet, according to the CFS.

“Jobs are becoming obsolete on a monthly basis. New jobs are taking over. As we move to AI (artificial intelligence), robotics, all these kinds of things, certainly jobs are going to be replaced. New jobs are going to be created, mostly at the high scale end,” said Carleton’s Duxbury.

In fact, between 2016 and 2026, the largest wealth transfer in history is expected to take place as older generations pass on as much as $1 trillion to younger generations in Canada, according to Toronto-based research firm Strategic Insight.
Foster predicts that millennials are likely to push for things such as increased estate taxes in order to ensure that some of the wealth that is transferred from older generations is redistributed throughout all of society.

She points out, as others have, that the positive correlation between productivity and wages has broken down; from 1973 to 2014, “only about 15 percent of productivity growth translated into higher hourly wages and benefits for the typical American worker,” with the remainder being siphoned off into shareholders’ pockets.

One of the more striking contradictions Shell explores is the idea that, in a nation that so values freedom, a surprising number of Americans feel trapped at work. In the white-collar workplace, American corporations are infamous for prioritizing “culture fit,” requiring employees to “merge their identities with the identities of the firm.”
While job-satisfaction surveys reveal a split between blue- and white-collar workers’ priorities, overall worker contentment has today dipped below the 50-percent mark.

The value of work has always been an elusive concept, made even more ephemeral in an age when most production requires little individual ingenuity, much hardship (whether it’s “culture fit,” zero benefits, or unreasonable physical demands), and a lower human-to-machine ratio than ever.
It used to surprise me that experts on the subject of automation and work tend to shy away from framing the “problem of work in the digital age” as a new chapter in an ongoing debate. Ricardo himself expressed concern over technological unemployment as early as 1821, at a moment when the Industrial Revolution seemed inextricably and positively linked to job creation.