INTRODUCTION

In late December 2019, reports started to circulate about a new virus in China that was spreading among people at an alarming rate. By the end of January, the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed that the virus, now called COVID-19, or coronavirus, was a global threat. Over the next few months, COVID-19 spread throughout the world, infecting more and more people, and causing countless deaths. COVID-19 was soon categorised as a global pandemic. Different to more recent viruses like SARS and MERS, suggests Mike Davis (2020: 13–14), coronavirus is a unique infection in three main ways. First, COVID-19 spreads in flu-like ways so that a person can have the virus without showing any clear signs or symptoms. Secondly, it has the potential to affect and damage heart tissue. Finally, early tests have shown that coronavirus has a hard and protective shell that allows it to survive longer in saliva, other body fluids and enjoy high resistance to outside conditions.

But it is also clear now that the pandemic has altered and fundamentally changed many social practices in society. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the relationship between digital technology, labour and work. In the United Kingdom, for example, one survey in April 2020 found that 46.6 per cent of people in employment did some work at home. And of those who did work at home, 86 per cent gave coronavirus as the reason for doing so (ONS 2020a). By June 2020, 49 per cent of the UK population said they had either exclusively worked at home or had worked from home while travelling to work (ONS 2020b). In America, a similar story of homeworking is evident. One study of a nationally representative sample of the US population found that, between 1–5 April 2020 to 2–8 May 2020, of those employed in the pre-COVID-19 times, nearly half were now working from home, with 35.2 per cent switching to working from home since the onset of the pandemic (Brynjolfsson et al. 2020).

For some, working at home has many positives. A UK consulting firm found in their survey that 57 per cent of 200 respondents said they have been ‘significantly’ or ‘somewhat’ more productive while working from home (Redfield & Wilton 2020).