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My office will let everyone work from home the second it’s convenient for them. A burst pipe, no AC, a snowstorm, whatever. That day, nobody worries about accountability. Nobody says we need you in person for culture. You’re just trusted to do your job from your kitchen table like an adult.

But ask for that same flexibility for your own life. A doctor’s appointment, picking up a sick kid, whatever it is. Suddenly remote work is a liability. Now it’s about visibility. Now it’s about whether you can really be trusted off-site.

Here’s the part that gives it away. If remote work actually hurt output or collaboration, it would hurt it during the emergency too. It doesn’t. So this was never about where work gets done best. It’s about who holds the discretion, and it’s never the employee.

The emergency cases are also less predictable, not more. A pipe bursting gives zero notice. A doctor’s appointment or a school pickup can be planned weeks out. My kind of flexibility is objectively easier to accommodate. It’s just treated like a favor instead of a baseline accommodation for having a life.

And I don’t think the fix is hybrid. Two days home, three in office, some arbitrary split handed down company-wide. That’s still the company holding all the discretion, just with a number attached to it. The real fix is flexibility negotiated between an employee and their actual supervisor. Different people need different things. What works for a parent doesn’t look like what works for someone with a disability, and doesn’t look like what works for someone neurodivergent, and none of that looks like what a healthy 25 year old with no dependents needs.

The pandemic proved this almost by accident. For a while, people who’d spent years jumping through hoops just to get basic accommodations suddenly had access by default. No medical paperwork, no HR gauntlet, no justifying yourself. Turns out a lot of people can thrive when the environment isn’t actively working against them.

Yes, some people took advantage of it. That’s real. But that’s not an argument for stripping flexibility from everyone. It’s an argument that work culture, management, and how we measure output all need to catch up. People don’t hate working. They want their work to fit around their actual lives, not the other way around. That’s not a radical ask. It’s a compromise, and most workplaces haven’t even tried to have that conversation.

Abdul El-Sayed crossed the border to discuss universal healthcare - a beast so complex that only 32 of the world’s 33 developed nations have been able to make it work