We all have the friend who gave up her lease in New York City and moved permanently into a lake house upstate and arranged to work remotely forever. Thousands of people moved halfway across the country or became permanent nomads if their job would allow it.
But then, there are the workers who skipped town without permission and hoped that the virtual Zoom background would keep their locations secret from their colleagues and bosses.
“One of my colleagues has been working from Spain,” a woman wrote to an advice column in February. “We work very closely together, but in the early days, he wouldn’t admit that he was abroad. I could see during Zoom calls that he had a suspiciously dark tan.”
Sometimes you’re hiding not what city you’re living in but whose house you’re working in. “Maintaining separate Zoom backgrounds while co-working from each other’s apartments and signing onto the same work meetings” was the tactic one couple in Washington, D.C., adopted. “If they were at Nicole’s house, Zack would Zoom from her backyard; at his place, she’d log on from his front patio.”
The secretly-out-of-town employee is extra problematic for certain public servants. Los Angeles’s teachers union warned teachers not to post any Caribbean or Mexican beach locations on social media in 2021 while the union was protesting a return to the classroom on safety grounds.
What if you’re a local elected official, though? Is it all right to serve on a city hall if you’ve moved out of the city, especially if all your council meetings are remote?
By a 5-to-4 majority, the Thornton, Colorado, city council voted no in February. Councilwoman Jacque Phillips bought a house 250 miles away in Alamosa, Colorado. Thornton is on the northern edge of Denver. Alamosa is in the San Luis Valley south and west of Denver.
Phillips took a full-time job for the San Luis Valley Board of Cooperative Educational Services and purchased a house there. She swore in her home loan that this Alamosa home was her primary residence.
So the council voted her off the island. There’s a clear strain of partisanship here: The vote to expel the liberal Phillips was along ideological lines, with the five conservatives voting in favor. But the general principle, that a city council member should live in the city and not 250 miles away, may be one we want to hold on to, even in this time of remote work.
