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

There is always an exchange of good and bad deeds between employees and employers. If you are a dick you should be treated as such. If you are a saint you should be too! You never just go to war with your employer or your employees.

I had one employer who would sometimes get stuck in a loop thanking me for what I've done, how embarrassed he was he couldn't pay me more and that he could never do what I did for such little money. I would mock him by listing the instances of terrible things that would have happened if I wasn't there. If he called me right now, years later, I would do what I could to keep his ship afloat just because the idea of having to fire people haunts him in his sleep.

My previous manager asked me to do an extra shift one time. I told him I understand why he asked it but that this must never happen again. Before that I told him that he couldn't just schedule an extra shift but that he should ask me first. If the place burned down around me I would use it to light my cigar after casually tossing my coat over my arm.

Converting offices to condos is for practical purposes illegal due to the very different regulations.

You can tear the buildings down and build new ones, but that will take a decade to get permitted, if you're in a construction permissive city.

Quite often, the bosses don’t. Their social circle is the company and that’s partly why they so desperately want back in the office.

This article dresses up truth in class warfare costume:

Companies and investors who own commercial real estate are facing a loss.

The thought is if people have to go back to the office, the commercial real estate is worth more, so there is incentive to return to the office.

I suspect we're way past the point where a work from the office mandate is going to make any measurable difference in property value. CEOs sitting on big rents and big buildings should start preparing their investors and boards for the inevitable loss and not lose sign of this:

Your competitors without big real estate costs are in a much better competitive position.

The big fortune 100 tech companies are also commercial real estate owners and landlords. Look at all the buildings that Amazon owns and subleases in Seattle.

Those executives absolutely have an incentive to be pushing RTO because of their commercial real estate risk.

They also have an outsized bullhorn and the industry tends to watch what they do and report over what they do, and they have PR budgets which can get articles written the way they want. Bezos outright owns the WaPo.

Further down the ladder that PR will land on businesses where it just reinforces the attitudes of management towards RTO and gives them arguments to make in meetings. The people in those meetings don't necessarily have any skin in the commercial real estate game, but if they've spent the past 3 years reading articles about remote work and RTO published in the business press influenced by those who do have a whole lot of skin in the game, how do you attribute causality?

They way I'd look at it is that you can't take it in isolation and you need to step outside of naive root cause analysis that looks at the manager in the company who has no skin in the game and says that they can't possibly be influenced by the commercial real estate issues. For any individual "atom" of a manager in this analysis their own biases will more strongly influence what they're doing, but everyone in that room has been reading the same articles, and industrial propaganda and PR actually is effective at shaping attitudes. They are blowing on the dice, or turning up the temperature, or whatever analogy you like that draws a parallel to statistical mechanics and the bulk behavior of matter in the presence of individual randomness.