There is a lot I love about the Elon Twitter saga. Scoping it to this issue (remote work):
1. We all know that "butts in seats" is a form of psychological control. Yes, there can be benefits to physical proximity. For software engineers, there can be benefit for collaboration, team-building and teaching. You can do this remotely but it's more difficult. However, for a lot of jobs however there is absolutely zero benefit to the employee.
2. This should remind people that your relationship with your employer is fundamentally adversarial. Remote work, despite it saving tech companies in particular, a lot of money for office space, onsite perks, equipment and so on, sold it to you as a "benefit". It started out of necessity in the pandemic. More recently it became a compeititve necessary to draw and retain talent in a tight labor market. In an era of mass layoffs in tech that advantage is no longer needed so companies can revert to their natural state of seeking control and not offering benefits they don't have to;
3. Elon is a very old school American (ironic, considering he's South African) boss who very much rules out of fear and for whom loyalty only flows in one direction: up (to him). He is not Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. He's just another annoying, cringey, incredibly privileged fail-son. I'm honestly glad more people are realizing this as this is not the man to deify;
4. Morale among the remaining Twitter staff must be (I would guess) incredibly bad right now. Rather than extending these people an olive branch, the Bataan death march of reshaping Twitter into Musk's soulless image continues without respite, casulaties be damned; and
5. For many this will be there first downturn market as you could easily have been in the workforce for the last 12 years without ever experiencing it. You may have bought into the idea, particularly if you're an engineer or other highly specialized position, bought into the idea that tech companies are different and/or that you aren't expendable or replaceable. None of this is true. Unfortunately, people (Americans in particular) use such rationalizations to argue against any form of labor organization as being unnecessary or that somehow they'll all be dragged down to the "average" by collective bargaining. Such ideas are just highly effective propaganda.
Sorry Tweeps for all you're going through.