No one at PC was leaving martinetlike orders—unaccompanied by conversation, phone or otherwise—on the green screen. And Hewes painstakingly consulted over the phone with her writers. Moreover, while Hewes worked from home at least seventy of the hundred hours, she was at the PC offices several times a week to socialize, pick up mail, and swap ideas. And she would have come in, occasionally, anyway, even if she lived fifty miles from the magazine. (Also, she was in the field for face-to-face interviews, just as Fuller, working for the Navy, would visit his “clients.”) As the telecommuting movement grows, workers and supervisors alike should remember to see and speak to others, not just key to each other.
Whatever the case here, both Hewes and PC were tickled with her telecommuting arrangement. “We’re not paying for office space, electricity, desk space,” said David H. Bunnell, then publisher and editor in chief. “She even provides her own coffee.” An office for her might have cost the equivalent of $1,200 a year. More important, however, Bunnell happily noted the thousands of words she writes for each issue: “She couldn’t be more productive, and she does her research conscientiously. Like the article she did on printers. It was obvious she’d surveyed twenty or thirty manufacturers in the field.”
Close to a year later, Hewes told me that she was no longer telecommuting regularly. Bunnell had been so happy with her work that he had appointed her editor at the book division of PC World, which he had started after leaving PC Magazine. Hewes still loved the concept of telecommuting. But she understood its limits better. “When I was an associate editor of PC Magazine,” she said, “I was actually more of a writer than an editor, and I didn’t have to be as much a manager as I am now. But now I have to juggle ten book projects and do budgets and go to several meetings a week. My ideal thing would be to go to the office two days a week and work at home the other three. I figure I’ll work on that for next year. Now all I’ve got to do is get everyone I need to see to come in the same two days that I do!”
Bunnell himself offers another qualification in praising telecommuting—not everyone has the needed discipline—but he says telecommuting can work especially well for people who write or sell. One New York magazine publisher, in fact, developed a special computer system for handicapped people, featuring written prompts to keep sales pitches consistent. And Bunnell thinks that telecommuting can work for executives, too, with the right system, taking advantage of computerized records of the words they keyed in.
Can clerical-level workers, however, also telecommute happily?
A South Carolina case illustrates both the blessings and potential pitfalls of telecommuting for clerical people.[[61]]
Blue Cross-Blue Shield there says it isn’t running an electronic sweatshop. The telecommuters’ rewards are roughly comparable to those of the regular office workers, and some cottage keyers can actually come out far ahead. The program has been going on for years. And there’s a long waiting list.
Ann Blackwell, one of the keyers, transmits her work back to Blue Cross at the crack of dawn; then she can fix breakfast for her two children and take breaks for household work and lunch. “I’d rather do this than go to the office,” she said. “I don’t have to dress. I don’t have someone looking over my shoulder all the time to see if I’m working.”
In a typical day a “cottage keyer” processes 360 claims forms from doctors. The pay is sixteen cents a claim, or $57.60 for the 360, minus a levy of $10.20 for equipment rental, meaning that the worker ends up with $47.40 before taxes.
That’s $2.18 more a day than full-time employees at Blue Cross receive for similar work, if you consider the full timers’ benefits like holidays, sick leave, vacation, and disability and health insurance. A good clerk could earn some $12,000 a year. And $12,000 is nothing to sneer at in South Carolina where many living costs are low.