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This article offers a theorization based on selected literature focused on problematizing the work-from-home phenomenon. It incorporates labour process theory and the work-from-home literature to dissect the impact of enforced working from home procedures during COVID-19. The article presents the advantages to working from home from the existing work-from-home literature and draws on labour process theory to challenge these advantages. The disadvantages discussed in this article include constant availability, enhanced productivity with unpaid labour, loss of worker subjectivity, identity conflicts, and extracting productivity while downloading costs of production to workers. While the advantages include enhanced autonomy, reduction in unproductive time and increased affordances in participation, empowerment and worker agency, the article weighs the potential, parallel impacts of worker control and reduction in personal wellbeing. Although it seems that the work-from-home arrangement is, predominantly, here to stay, I argue that workers consent to their demise, as the dark side of enforced work-from-home arrangements detract from the benefits of in-person social relations of work and learning.

This article focuses on wage theft experienced by workers in precarious jobs in Ontario, Canada. Workers report that employers utilize subtle forms of wage theft, which one respondent in this study described as “roundabout” wage theft. We argue that the enforcement of the Employment Standards Act requires not only action on overt wage theft but also a proactive approach which challenges employers' subtle practices which result in wage theft. We highlight two sets of practices resulting in wage theft, although these may not always in themselves represent violations of the law. First, employers use discourses of futurity where promises of future work or payment are evoked to deter employee action on unpaid wages. Second, employers set up confusing payment structures which mask unpaid wages as difficult‐to‐detect errors.