A pandemic disrupting business is not the same as "requiring" you to work from home in other scenarios. Many companies, especially larger ones with thousands of employees, have not contributed significantly to home office costs or hardware to take home because doing so would be very expensive and would require buying a lot of additional equipment.

WTF, there were clearly times when going to the standard workplace offices was NOT allowable by BAG and even outside of those times many companies even closed their offices and issues statements that employees were to stay home unless in case of an emergency, for reasons of safety. So, I have no idea why you are trying to portray like the pandemic has been some kind of free choice for everyone?

I've also done work for banks where printing is impossible with the company-supplied computer connected by VPN. And yes, it would have been practical for research sometimes -- charts, reports, tables etc.

Does the availability of a printer strengthen one's temptation to share confidential banking data? Your guess is as good as mine. For whatever reason, it appears that it is not considered a serious attack vector to simply take a photo of the screen and treat it with OCR.

I am not trying to portray anything, I am speaking of my own experience.

As per BAG rules, we had 1 month mandatory work from home last year. I expect everybody to be able to make due without a pen or a printer for a month, especially in these pandemic times.

Right now there is no mandatory work from home rule, as we can very well see from traffic and such. It is highly recommended but there are so many exceptions that we can say many people are now working in their office, maybe as little as once or twice per week.

Personally, I have been working from home since March 2020, employer lets me decide whether I want to go to the office or not.

As I said, if employer decided to close their offices altogether, then it's another matter.

As I said, separate to BAG, some large companies are closing offices or putting them on limited service and asking you to work from home due to the pandemic and not wanting to increase the risk of infections. That still doesn't mean they pay for your home office equipment like desk or monitor etc.

Two different ways of doing things and it is much easier to get the data off of a printer. Obviously you can't do anything about someone simply taking a photo of a screen with a phone camera while at home, whereas you can do something about allowing use of a printer while at home.

During the period where we weren't allowed into the office, we could bring home any equipment we needed (screens, docking stations, etc).

After the equipment was returned to the office, we now get a docking station, headset + a couple hundred bucks to spend on whatever we want.

It‘s not just client data, it‘s having any kind of confidential data floating around your home. In the office lockable cupboards and confidential waste bins are provided and clean desk policies implemented. This isn‘t possible/easily enforced at home.

That's called lack of leadership.

The equipment is there in the office for pickup. Someone just needs to take responsibility for the material taken from the office to home. In our department we organized to avoid being there at the same time, but sooner than later I picked up 2 screens, docking station, a nice chair (giroflex), couple packs of A4 paper and some books I regularly use.

It's real funny that one of my neighbors can use the company car as personal car, and somehow it's to complicate to let employees pick up a chair and some computer screens. We've been living like this for 1 year, I guess enough time to adapt.

PS. taking the office material home may depend on the hardware leasing contract. In any case, I'd expect those companies with 1000s of employees to have a better negotiation leverage with hardware leasing companies than smaller companies. It seems smaller companies have adapted better.....so lack of leadership.

Yup, the "small" company (150 employees) I work for, did a fantastic job and, within 48 hours, they managed to organise pick up (or delivery!) of office supplies to everybody!