Corporations still remain selfish and are not yet willing to step up to the plate and make a significant contribution in the battle against Global Warming. It's pretty clear - with the world reaching peak oil, gas prices continually rising, and confronting the Global Warming Crisis - that having hundreds of people driving cars to a company HQ every day, just so they can spend the entire day sitting in front of a computer screen, is not only absurd but unsustainable. The reality that is staring us in the face is that things simply cannot carry on like this.

Corporations' desperate clinging to this absurd and anachronistic practice, known as "commuting to work", is especially absurd in the light of the fact that we have already made the investment in an Internet infrastructure that makes it possible to work remotely. We are now, in a sense, entering the Golden Age of Remoting. There is just no good enough reason to require employees to drag themselves in to a distant corporate HQ when the very nature of their work should allow them to work from home and - in so doing - become part of the Global Warming solution.

The Internet that we have come to know and love emerged, ironically, out of pioneering work conducted by the US Department of Defence's Advanced Research Projects Agency (now known as DARPA). That early project was codenamed ARPANet and was, of course, funded by American taxpayers. As the word "defense" would imply, it is the purview of the DOD to protect US national security. It would seem, then, that the taxpayer investment in the ARPANet project should pay off in improved national security, and taxpayers should insist that the Internet bring benefits in this regard.

Fortunately, the Internet is instrumental in facilitating remote working. The DOD has already established in previous studies that Global Warming poses a real threat to global security and - consequently - to US national security. And commuting, of course, is implicated in Global Warming, since cars contribute significantly to greenhouse gas production. In addition to Global Warming, commuting also poses a threat to US energy security and the goal of energy self sufficiency by placing an unreasonable burden on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, thereby placing the US in a position where it is forced to fund unfriendly - even hostile - foreign regimes that just happen to be well endowed in the fossil fuel department.

Therefore, it can reasonably be argued that it is a matter of national security that the Internet be effectively utilized in the battle against Global Warming and securing our energy independence, and that using the Internet as the backbone of an aggressively scaled up telecommuting regimen would help significantly towards both these aims.

It is still customary for employees to pay for their own expenses incurred while transporting their bodies from their place of domicile to their place of employ. However, when corporations incur transportation and traveling costs, they invariably endeavor to transfer those costs to the consumer - often obfuscated by many layers of markup and financial complexity. As a society, all employees are essentially offering corporations free shipping - of themselves!

It is an indication of the unhealthy power relationship between corporations and their employees that employees are not able charge their employers for the transport costs incurred in providing their services. One of the core tenets of corporations that are continually trying to squeeze out more profit for their shareholders is the use of the principle of externality. The more that a corporation can make others inadvertently pick up the tab for costs generated by their business activities, the more they can increase their profit margins. We let corporations off the hook for the costs - to us, society, and the environment - of commuting to the workplace.

As taxpayers, we are paying our tax money to the corporations in many ways. Our commuting absurdity accomplishes the following...

In a nutshell, commuting is bad for the environment, puts stress and wear on our taxpayer funded freeway infrastructure, exposes employees to risk of injury and/or death on the freeways, is economically wasteful, and wastes valuable time that individuals could better spend living their lives and being near their families.

If corporations don't recognize now that there is change brewing and they don't adapt to become more flexible in working arrangements, they will pay the price of not being competitive enough in marketplace for skilled IT workers, and they will miss out on good employees. This cost will have an impact on their financial prospects, ultimately.

As the price of commuting inevitably rises as we near the end of cheap oil, and as other fossil fuels become responsible for their impact on the planet through carbon taxes that add to their price tag, so more and more people are going to insist on being able to work from home more frequently. Moreover, as areas like Silicon Valley reach their population saturation point and housing becomes increasingly unaffordable with the growing disparity between employee salaries and housing costs, companies that don't retool their organizations to employ remote workers will miss out on some of the smartest people.

Companies that are unwilling to support telecommuting positions will miss out on excellent and highly skilled candidates who are intelligent enough to see the writing on the wall - people who are indeed smart enough to realize that they would be better off earning half the salary working from a different state but paying a quarter of the housing cost and enjoying an all round lower cost of living.

It is supremely irresponsible that American corporations should so quickly jump at the opportunity to offshore IT work to nations such as India, and completely overlook the possibility of employing Americans for IT jobs in regions of this country where it is more affordable to live. It seems like a double standard that corporations would not first look to fulfilling their needs for cheaper remote workers at home, and would instead be in such a rush to send jobs overseas.

What we need now is a public mandate to pressure companies to reform their work policies and permit a far greater degree of telecommuting, particularly for workers whose work predominantly involves working on a computer all day long. The issue of Global Warming is just too important to allow corporations the indulgence of burdening all of our systems - just so that they can have the sense of comfort derived from surveying vast cube farms of industrious worker bees at a company HQ.

We need a more enlightened attitude to work and the workplace. Putting pressure on corporations through the legislative process will spur them to come up with imaginitive and sensible responses, such as setting up more smaller satellite offices, allowing employees to work fewer but longer days, permitting employees to work a minimum number of days per week from home, etc.

I would propose a classic "carrot and stick" approach to nudging corporations in the right direction. On the one hand, the legislation process should be used to mandate that companies meet a minimum requirement of a percentage of hours worked remotely for those workers who can perform their work remotely, enforced with a penalty for failing to meet their quota. This would be the stick. As for the carrot, I would propose offering a range of tax incentives to business that step up to the plate and show their willingness to boldly contribute to the Global Warming problem by embracing substantial measures to encourage remote employment.

We can all become a part of the solution to Global Warming by forcing the telecommute issue with the companies that employ us and insisting that our employers adopt more enlightened and flexible work policies that are in step with the circumstances of our modern reality. Start by insisting on an allowance of just one day a week, and see where it leads from there as you build up your employer's trust. Employers should have the confidence that productivity is not negatively impacted and that you can be as effective - possibly even more effective - while working remotely.

Apparently I am not alone in feeling this way on the subject of telecommuting. This seems to be an issue that is rising to the surface of public consciousness, as evidenced by articles such as the following...

Read the article: Gas prices drive workers - and bosses - to telecommute (cnn.com)