The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

Fortune 10 and 50 companies will probably mandate everyone go back to work because theyre heavily invested in the type of real estate that could crucify them in a crash, but for the 99% of remaining employers the choice is an absolute no brainer. The small architecture firm, the payment processing company, local accountants and underwriters will all ignore the shot across the bow from elites and save a ton of cash in the process.

Its not about if but when at this point. Biden sent all the federal workers back to the office but it isnt going to be enough. Elites are going to take a bite of what could wind up being a nearly trillion dollar shit sandwich they cooked up in their own kitchen.

A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communication between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to take place.

What amuses me though is that until 1980 or so people thought factory work was the worst kind of work, maybe best expressed in the Ray Davies song "Working At the Factory"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0khnH1qi6M

Once the factories left, however, people realized service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in your town is one of the best things a politician can take credit for.

Real estate like that is actually (well, in the olden days) an appreciating long-term asset as well as a well-lobbied avenue for balance sheet games. Commercial real estate is subject to yearly depreciation, unlike your home. It can be somewhat arbitarily valued or devalued (see the games that Trump plays with real estate and taxes, sorry to introduce some politics), but generally real estate is tangible and appreciates long term.

Although if a company has a RECENTLY constructed office then it very much is a sunk cost, because the depreciation is on a 10 or 20 year schedule (don't remember exactly) and hasn't appreciated, and of course they haven't gotten the actual "house workers who make money for you" return. SO I agree with that. And of course all the companies don't want to see their already-depreciated by market appreciated values collapse under them. They want more sucker startups to but their appreciated properties once their business model ages.

Now, I guess we'll see how much the author's contention of a bubble/apocalypse plays out, but we'll know if office tower -> housing becomes a recurring thing. It wasn't with dilapidated malls, although it probably should have been.

As hinted at, the masters of office space are very well integrated with local politicians and the pork train. It's one of the pillars of local politics and local corruption. They'll try to find ways to get tax breaks or find a bigger sucker (like the local government!) to take on the burden or bail them out.

In the future as the leases expire we may see shrinking and a slow return to more remote work as companies reduce the square footage of the leases.

Smart managers know that eliminating rent from balance sheets improves the bottom line.