2021年12月四级第1套仔细阅读 Passage 1 原文翻译及答案解析

As many office workers adapt to remote work, cities may undergo fundamental change if offices remain under-utilized. Who will benefit if working from home becomes the norm?

随着许多办公室工作者适应远程工作，如果办公室持续利用率低下，城市可能会发生根本性变化。如果在家工作成为常态，谁将受益？

Employers argue they make considerable savings on real estate when workers shift from office to home work. However, these savings result from passing costs on to workers.

雇主们认为，当员工从办公室转向在家工作时，他们在房地产方面节省了大量费用。然而，这些节省是通过将成本转嫁给员工实现的。

Unless employees are fully compensated, this could become a variant of parasitic (寄生的) capitalism, whereby corporate profits increasingly rely on extracting value from the public— and now personal— realm, rather than on generating new value.

除非员工得到充分补偿，否则这可能会成为一种寄生资本主义的变体，公司利润越来越依赖于从公共领域——以及现在的个人领域——提取价值，而不是创造新价值。

Though employers are backed by a chorus of remote work advocates, others note the loneliness, reduced productivity and inefficiencies of extended remote work.

尽管雇主们得到远程工作倡导者的大力支持，但其他人指出了长期远程工作的孤独感、生产力下降和低效率。

If working from home becomes permanent, employees will have to dedicate part of their private space to work. This requires purchasing desks, chairs and office equipment.

如果在家工作成为永久性的，员工将不得不将部分私人空间用于工作。这需要购买桌子、椅子和办公设备。

It also means having private space dedicated to work: the space must be heated, cleaned, maintained and paid for. That depends on many things, but for purposes of illustration, I have run some estimates for Montreal. The exercise is simple but important, since it brings these costs out of the realm of speculation into the realm of meaningful discussion.

这也意味着有专门用于工作的私人空间：空间必须供暖、清洁、维护和支付费用。这取决于许多因素，但为了说明，我对蒙特利尔进行了一些估算。这个练习很简单但很重要，因为它将这些成本从推测领域带入有意义的讨论领域。

Rough calculations show that the savings made by employers when their staff works from home are of similar value to the compensation workers should receive for setting up offices at home.

粗略计算显示，雇主因员工在家工作而节省的费用与员工因在家设立办公室而应获得的补偿价值相当。

What does this mean for offices in cities? One of two things may happen: Employers pass these costs onto employees. This would be a form of expropriation (侵占), with employees absorbing production costs that have traditionally been paid by the employer. This represents a considerable transfer of value from employees to employers. When employees are properly compensated, employers' real estate savings will be modest. If savings are modest, then the many advantages of working in offices-such as lively atmosphere, rapidity of communication, team-building and acclimatization (适应环境) of new employees will encourage employers to shelve the idea of remote work and, like Yahoo in 2013, encourage employees to work most of the time from corporate office space.

这对城市中的办公室意味着什么？可能会发生两种情况之一：雇主将这些成本转嫁给员工。这将是一种侵占形式，员工吸收了传统上由雇主支付的生产成本。这代表了价值从员工向雇主的大量转移。当员工得到适当补偿时，雇主的房地产节省将很有限。如果节省有限，那么在办公室工作的诸多优势——如活跃的氛围、沟通的迅速、团队建设以及新员工适应环境——将鼓励雇主搁置远程工作的想法，并像雅虎在2013年那样，鼓励员工大部分时间在公司办公空间工作。