If you’ve been on Twitter during the past six months, you’ve seen two genres of tweets.

Here’s one:

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Here’s the other:

For one class of people (parents), the lockdowns have been an utterly exhausting rat race where we try to work from home, semi-homeschool our children, and make up for their lack of friends. For another class of people (some nonparents) the lockdowns have meant a huge amount of free time to learn how to bake bread, speak Russian, or to take up new television shows.

This explains why many empathetic bosses responded to the lockdowns by giving a little more leeway to their employees with children. This didn’t always go over well.

“At a recent companywide meeting,” the New York Times reported recently, “Facebook employees repeatedly argued that work policies created in response to Covid-19 ‘have primarily benefited parents.’”

A virus that caused lockdowns that primarily harmed parents spurred company policies that primarily benefited parents — that’s the objection.

Childless Facebook workers were reportedly upset that “every Facebook employee would receive bonus amounts usually reserved for very good performance scores.”

That is, people able to put in more work while stuck at home got bonuses but were upset that folks who couldn’t put in as much work while stuck at home also got bonuses.

Jesus tells multiple parables about this sort of thing: If you get what’s promised you, why is it any business of yours that someone else got more than you think they deserved?

At the bottom here is an overdeveloped sensitivity to fairness. If parents get days off and slack on deadlines, the thinking goes, those are benefits, and it’s unfair for parents to get more benefits than nonparents. The only fair thing would be to extend such slack to nonparents or pay nonparents more than parents.

This line of thinking shows up very frequently in the conversations at the intersection of the workplace, the family, and politics.

When we talk about expanding maternity and paternity leave, someone always pipes up to point out that this is unfair, because it’s a benefit nonparents don’t get. When Republicans were expanding the child tax credit, some conservatives objected that a child tax credit was picking winners and losers. Some leftists, when pushing for a universal basic income, argue that we should exclude children and that parents should not get a higher universal basic income than nonparents because parents are simply choosing to spend their money on children, and that shouldn’t be given preferential treatment over spending your universal basic income on, say, a jet ski.

This mindset is fatally materialistic and ultimately anti-human. It posits that having children and dedicating time and money to them is a consumer choice.

Feminist columnist Jill Filipovic waded into these workplace mommy-and-daddy wars to defend the irked childless (“child-free,” in CNN’s style, as if children are an allergen). Filipovic provides a reasonable solution that tells neither parents nor nonparents “tough luck.” She implores employers to demand less from all their workers because everyone is under extra stress, which will eventually end.

“Workplaces either need to scale down expectations across the board so that parents can step back and those who are not caretakers can continue to work as usual, or workplaces need to scale up hiring in order to fill the gap.”

Frankly, many employers are doing exactly that — but not all, I’m sure. Filipovic points out that some bosses are trying to take up the new free time their childless workers have and that the always-work-from-home setup leads to a lack of a break between work and home. These are problems, Filipovic rightly states.

But still, a dehumanizing materialism creeps into Filipovic’s argument, as she articulates a common thought on the Left: “Work is not your family and it is not your friend; the only way your employer shows how much they value you is in how they compensate you.”

I don’t think this attitude is healthy or productive — or shared by most people. Yes, many people have jobs they do not like — this is inevitable. In such cases, work is a simple transaction: You provide labor, and your employer pays you in return.

Filipovic is an attorney, and this is a legalistic, transactional way to see things. But in good jobs, unless things are going poorly, the employer-employee relationships are not this legalistic and transactional.

Work shouldn’t take the place of family, but your work can and should be a relationship — which means humans valuing one another as humans, not merely as “inputs” or “assets.”

When my daughter was in the hospital, it was from my colleagues (at the Washington Examiner and the American Enterprise Institute) that I got much of the support I got. This included my bosses and the people whose boss I was.

When I was an editor, I considered it part of my job to help my writers develop as journalists and people. This was not merely for what they could give the Washington Examiner, but because I was in a position of mentorship and leadership, and so helping them grow was what I was called on to do — not contractually but morally.

I have had many bosses who have held maternal or paternal feelings toward me and provided me with life advice and help beyond payment or formal training.

If bosses are taking extra pity on parents, that’s because the bosses see parents as people, not merely workers. Bosses, should, of course, take pity on everyone affected by the virus and the lockdowns. A prerequisite of this is moving beyond the purely transactional understanding of a job.