151–160 of 371 posts
This isn't particularly well-argued. Just a lot of handwavy grievance about "elites" as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.
How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO? How are they forcing these companies to renew their leases when they expire?
It's sunk cost. They have CRE leases they can't back out of and want to leverage their expensive real estate. 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In principle it could be straight up targeted propaganda "making" the bosses do that. I have no idea if the reality is more that, or more the banal "nobody is organising anything like this and suggestions to the contrary are just conspiracy theories, the bosses genuinely believe what they're saying". I currently have a boss who appears to sincerely want people back in the office; he doesn't want to be the CEO of a 10…
I feel like often article-writers miss the fact of people like your boss: some people just legitimately like being in an office and there's no conspiracy to speak of. As someone who likes being in an office, I personally feel that everyone becoming permanent WFH basement gremlins is a bad thing overall. Human contact is a good thing , and my observations of people who are 100% WFH is that they almost never interact w…
I don't think that kind of human contact is better than spending more time with my wife and kids.
My personal feeling about people eager to go back to the office is that they have empty jobs, but walking around from meeting to meeting, from the water fountain to the coffee machine, and bikeshedding other people's work makes them feel worthy. Of course, they need other people around to have meetings and "work".
What recourse do we as workers have? We can soft boycott and quit/stop applying to onsite positions, but there are hundreds of thousands willing and able to take these positions.
This isn't particularly well-argued. Just a lot of handwavy grievance about "elites" as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.
You don't need a coordinated conspiracy if the incentives of each person in the chain line up to this inevitability.
Beyond real estate concerns, my take is fully remote companies are demonstrating how to be productive in a flatter, more asynchronous work structure. This is an existential threat to the exec and managerial class, who are demanding RTO in a fight for their own existence.
This isn't particularly well-argued. Just a lot of handwavy grievance about "elites" as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.
But there is direct evidence that politicians are influencing corporations to alter return to office policies:
- Mayor of SF asking businesses to pledge to implement RTO policies: https://sfist.com/2022/03/03/mayor-breed-would-like-you-back...
- Mayor of NYC basically doing the same: https://archive.is/si6xd
We’re afraid of the companies who offshored so many jobs that they killed off entire industries in the US? There’s nothing they won’t do for a buck. If remote work doesn’t happen now, it will in the near future when they realize how much they can save on real estate costs.
The problem is that lots of wealth capital (both personal and corporate) is tied up in commercial real estate. It’s the reason everyone from Martha Stewart to Musk to hedge fund managers are screaming about how “unethical” remote work is. They literally can’t afford to have those buildings sit empty, so they will have to force the peons back into them by any means necessary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Municipal and government workers are different, as they can always demand whatever they want because they don't have competition and don't need to turn a profit so you're stuck with them whether you like it or not. What else are you gonna do, get your permit from another country's government? The government's monopoly is the real leverage here.
Many industries (in the US at least) are dominated by union labor. Some jobs even require union membership, even if you don't want to join the union. So these companies simply can't avoid union workers if they actually want staff.
In Germany, the unions function more as partners of the business owners and collaborate together on finding the general compromise that won't disturb company profits or the way the business operates, while in the US it seems like unions must treat the business like antagonists even at the sake of company profits because "all business owners are evil so fuck them".
So even if the US has fewer unions than in Europe, they're generally a lot more powerful, which is why many were infiltrated by the mob.
If my memory serves me correctly the earliest unions in Germany were very similar to the unions in the US, as in they were started from clashes with the business owners, and they were in charge of handling stuff like healthcare and pensions pots of the workers, similar to the unions in north america today.
But the Kaiser saw the growing unions and their pensions pots getting bigger along with their nation wide influence over the working class, as threats to the state's own influence and control over the workers, so he dismantled them and introduced them under the new state pension plan, so the modern state social pension in Germany stems form the Kaiser's fear of the workers' unions. :)