As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments encouraged or mandated homeworking wherever possible. This study examines the impact of this public health initiative on homeworkers’ well-being. It explores if the general factors such as job autonomy, demands, social support and work–nonwork conflict, which under normal circumstances are crucial for employees’ well-being, are outweighed by factors specific to homeworking and the pandemic as predictors of well-being. Using data from four-week diary studies conducted at two time periods in 2020 involving university employees in the UK, we assessed five factors that may be associated with their well-being: job characteristics, the work–home interface, home location, the enforced nature of the homeworking, and the pandemic context. Multi-level analysis confirms the relationship between four of the five factors and variability in within-person well-being, the exception being variables connected to the enforced homeworking. The results are very similar in both waves. A smaller set of variables explained between-person variability: psychological detachment, loneliness and job insecurity in both periods. Well-being was lower in the second than the first wave, as loneliness increased and the ability to detach from work declined. The findings highlight downsides of homeworking, will be relevant for employees’ and employers’ decisions about working arrangements post-pandemic, and contribute to the debate about the limits of employee well-being models centred on job characteristics.

In May 1901 an article appeared in the Yarmouth Advertiser and Gazette entitled ‘Alleged Traffic in Pauper Corpses—How the Medical Schools are Supplied—The Shadow of a Scandal’. It recounted that, although a pauper named Frank Hyde aged fifty had died in Yarmouth workhouse on 11 April 1901, his body was missing from the local cemetery. The case caused a public outcry because the workhouse death register stated that Hyde had been “buried by friends” in the parish five days after he had died. An editorial alleged that “the body was sent to Cambridge for dissection” instead and that the workhouse Master's clerk profited 15 shillings from the cadaver's sale. Following continued bad publicity, the visiting committee of Yarmouth Union investigated the allegations. They discovered that between 1880 and 1901 “26 bodies” had been sold for dissection and dismemberment under the terms of the Anatomy Act (1832) to the Cambridge anatomical teaching school situated at Downing College. The Master's clerk staged a false funeral each time a pauper died in his care. He arranged it so that “coffins were buried containing sand or sawdust or other ingredients but the body of the person whose name appeared on the outside [emphasis in original]” of each coffin never reached the grave. This was Hyde's fate too. Like many paupers who died in the care of Poor Law authorities in the nineteenth century, Hyde's friends and relatives lacked resources to fund his funeral expenses. Consequently, he underwent the ignominy of a pauper burial, but not in Yarmouth. His body was conveyed on the Great Eastern railway in a “death-box” to Cambridge anatomical teaching school. Following preservation, which took around four months, the cadaver was dissected and dismembered. It was interred eleven months after death in St Benedict's parish graveyard within Mill Road cemetery, Cambridge, on 8 March 1902. A basic Christian service was conducted by John Lane of the anatomy school before burial in a pauper grave containing a total of six bodies. The plot was unmarked and Frank Hyde disappeared from Poor Law records—the end product of pauperism.

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