We need to get back to the office
DEAR Editor, I read with interest that Goldman Sachs is to open an office in Birmingham
(Post, April 15). Bravo, I say. It is a courageous decision which can only be positive for this city.
However, while it is happy to invest in new city centre property, I know of many other established companies doing the precise opposite and closing or diminishing offices on the basis we have suffered a pandemic for a year or two.
Suddenly they have realised people can work at home. I could have told them that a decade ago, yet now it dawns on them.
What these firms fail to realise is that they are part of a wider picture, and form part an organic human network that allows us to thrive as a society and a species.
Closing offices will ultimately close city centres. Kiss goodbye to shops and businesses, and shiny new tower blocks, and say farewell to thousands or millions of jobs on the back of that.
We in this country have already lost millions of manufacturing jobs over the decades and now our corporations seem intent on killing off other sectors: hospitality, services, transport, retail. I think firms will only be happy when workers are essentially an eyeball connected to a brain in a jar. Better still, when they have no workers, and computers run everything.
We’re a social animal. We work better together. It’s the only way we will thrive.
My message is as soon as the pandemic subsides –as it will – get back in the office!
T Rogers, Kings Heath, Birmingham