Will changes in the way we work make changes in our politics, and what we expect from government? The New York Times magazine ponders the question.

The changes in employment are small significant. The number of Americans who work at home has doubled since 1990, and now stands at 4.2 million. Another 20 million work at home part time. "Most," say s Matt Bai, "represent a kind of modern, untethered American workforce."

Politicians are not necessarily friendly to these developments:

Democrats meanwhile are prone to castigate employers who would outsource jobs to self-employed contractors, regarding the transition toward an independent work force as the mugging of the little guy.

Of course, some people actually prefer these kinds of arrangements, opting out of large corporate environments. 

Bai finds some benefits to this approach: "The age of broadband means we might reasonably imagine a day when the American workplace of “face time” and endless polluting commutes fades slowly into the past, replaced by a society where vastly more workers get control over their daily lives." 

But the transition to a new workforce, which could offer greater personal satisfaction to workers and productivity to the economy, runs up against some policy-imposed obstacles:

... if workers’ benefits weren’t tied to employers, then they could transition into independent status without fear of losing their health care or pensions, and more employers would gladly oblige, since they could move costly benefits packages off their books. And yet the old, employer-based canon of policies makes it impossible for most workers with a modest income to even consider becoming their own bosses. Self-employed workers pay more than 15 percent of their incomes to Social Security, while traditional workers pay half that rate. (Some economists like to say this is a meaningless distinction, since employers are in theory taking their share of Social Security payments out of their employees’ wages, but in practice few employers or employees see it that way.) Life and disability insurance remain prohibitively expensive for independent workers with modest incomes, and unemployment insurance and flexible spending accounts for child care are available only through employers.

In other words, a system devised before the word “telecommute” ever existed helps to keep ordinary workers chained to their modular cubicles, while richer workers get to take advantage of a new, potentially liberating lifestyle.