Work Reform

It's because a huge amount of business is centered around made up things for going to work.

Things you need to work in an office: suits, dry cleaning for the suits, dress shoes, a car (because public transportation is woefully inadequate for this reason), gas for the car, maintenance for the car, lunch, daycare, a dog walker, you have less time so you are more likely to eat out for dinner, also more likely to hire maids, you are stuck in a commute and radio is awful, so a music subscription, maybe a new phone, and might have to go out for drinks with the coworkers on the way home.

Staying at home, and much of the country on highly limited income, taught us how much we spend on the "privilege" of work. Everyone is still shocked at the emotional and opportunity cost work had, we're just starting to realize that most of what it sold to us either isn't real or isn't needed.

If people don't go back to work a sea of businesses will fail.

I don't care if remote workers are less productive (although I've seen no evidence that they are).

You can't convince me that spending an hour every morning travelling to get to an office, in order to sit in front of the exact two screens I have at home, is a good use of my time, nor is spending an hour getting home again.

That's about 450 hours a year for me. 18 whole days. Those days are mine now, and you're not having them back.

I have noticed that working remotely really opened up the job market for me. Instead of being limited to where public transportation can bring me within 45 minutes, I can work for any company within Europe from the comfort of my home office. It makes switching jobs so much easier and I am willing to tolerate much less shit before I quit. That degree of freedom might scare companies. They can't trap me anymore with the costs of uprooting my life for a better job.

The negativity comes almost entirely from two sorts of people

1. Rich property owners who are seeing their valuable office buildings plummet in value.
2. People who socialize primarily with work-mates and don't have other groups

To 1, fuck 'em. To 2, eh, maybe find a hobby now that you don't have to commute 2 hours a day

There's money in real estate. There's even more in commercial real estate. There's less money in commercial real estate that's vacant because people work from home.

Corpo news outlets are spewing out bullshit PR hitpieces to protect their investments on real-estate offices. COVID lockdown got them with their pants down and now are fighting tooth and nail to pull them back up lmao

Corpos actively trying to get people back to the office so middle management doesn't feel as useless.

Commutes are a detriment to the worker, but not to the company.

I think allot of Banks have a ton of assets tied up in commercial real estate. This is the real reason they are pushing everyone to go back to work. A lot of powerful people will loss money if the commercial real estate market crashes.

I'd say it's not all black or white. In my industry (software) most of my friends and colleagues have strong opinions about staying remote. It's mostly along the lines of "either let me continue to work from home or find someone else". Also most of the headhunter messages I get on LinkedIn offer up to 100% remote jobs. Of course this is all anecdotal and depends heavily on the field of work. But maybe it's worth considering that you have the power to shape your own future. If you do not want to work in an office, you'll find something else. Don't let those corporations fool you.

My whole job revolves around cloud computing platforms, why do I need to be in an office? Yet it's looking like I'm going to be forced to make the choice of returning to an office I've never been to, or holding out until I find a new remote gig, while hurting my family financially.

The stupidest thing about the whole return to work things is that I've seen a lot of jobs and people who were remote prior to COVID are also being forced back into the office as well, creating financial hardships for those people. This is all just a shadow layoff, just a means to trimming the "fat", and I'm betting they're going to overcorrect and become even harsher with anyone that wants to not be in the office constantly.

You're not crazy.

Fact is, at the beginning, remote work was a requirement for companies to keep operating (aka, printing money for the execs and shareholders), so it was freely discussed as a positive thing.

Now that shareholders and execs can require RTO, the narrative is reversed. If you look at most of the articles surrounding WFH "not working" there's a very high chance that the motivation for such statements revolves around what management says about WFH, with no actual data to corroborate the message.

If you do your own research, a lot of what was true for WFH at the start of the pandemic is still true. The numbers and studies show that on the whole in the majority of circumstances, WFH increases productivity and makes workers happier overall. There are a few exceptions to this, I'm sure of that, and for each person, WFH or in office should be a personal choice, but it's not. You should be allowed to work where you feel most productive and happy. As long as it doesn't negatively impact your output, then it shouldn't matter, but to execs, it does matter.

IMO, the motivation for forced RTO is twofold: first, control. The company you work for wants to exert control over you, so you have to do something that maybe you're not a big fan of doing, simply because they say so. Additionally, they have more control over your day to day actions while you're at the office. When you get to converse with others, monitoring how much time you're spending away from your desk, the ability to walk up to you and grill you for any reason (or no reason). The second, is justifying office expenses. Either to be able to write it off, or pay their real estate owning buddies so those people can get money that could otherwise go to, IDK, wages (lol, it wouldn't, but you know), and by having the vast majority of their workforce in house all the time, they can keep that going.

I'm sure there's more to it, but that's my impression. Fact is, very few companies are allowing RTO to be just an option. Everything is either part-in-office (aka hybrid), or forced full time RTO. Full remote positions are evaporating.

That easy, beginning of the pandemic: Companies panic that all their employees would call in sick. Or some even die (not that they'd care, but a lot of companies have a bus factor of one). So remote work gets tolerated or praised, everything works great.

Now the pandemic is "over", it's safe to go back into the office. Companies have massive real estate costs, so they want to put their employees back into the office. Besides middle managers being afraid of their jobs as they seem to have become useless if they can't look over your shoulder and micromanage you.

It's never about facts, it's always what the companies and managers want in the moment.

It's about money and control. Money invested in and harvested from owning commercial properties. Control from making employees do things they don't want to, just to beat them down and "keep them in line". A lot of bosses exercise power for its own sake, unfortunately.

I have empathy for folks who want to collaborate, and/or be mentored, and/or socialize at work. I no longer want or need those things from my job, but....I came up that way so it would be hypocritical of me to say that others shouldn't want them.

On the other hand, cars are destroying everything and commuting in 2023 (if you don't truly need to) is just dumb. Progress always comes with some amount of pain and adjustment.

People working from home aren't consuming much anymore.

Of course there's commercial property leases and micromanaging bosses, but I think the uptick in this messaging is in response to people spending less money.

Less money on cars, gas, clothes, eating out, fancy coffee, hair/nails, dry cleaning, kid/animal care, gym (?), and probably so much more that I'm not thinking of.

And when we do spend money on those things, they're lasting longer and we're getting more discerning. When I do consider spending money on eating out, I'll def choose going hungry over getting something lower quality.

Working from home is legitimately amazing. My bud oes not need to sit at your desk with your lame chair and keyboard. He has a much faster pc at home with the big clicky-clackies. Ten hour work day? He will bring that shizz down to 6-8 with the same productivity and can play games on the side.

I get that it doesn't work for everyone, especially those with task management issues, but out of the 40 people I know, 2 do better in an office.

This is because they want you to continue being serfs. The pandemic put the brakes on that, but now it's it back to serfdom full steam ahead.

Businesses wanted to seem like they cared about people's health and safety at the beginning of the pandemic, now commercial property values are tanking and that means the ruling class loses a vector from which they can siphon wealth away from the working class.

In my observation it has been industry and sector dependent.

Corporate tech and finance are calling for remote work to end. Most of the articles I see where going back to the office is touted are all "silicon valley" type companies and finance/investment firms writing opinion peices.

PR, marketing, and news media, comms fields - which I am in - are doing the opposite. I work in digital media with government clients and my office just had a building contractor come in and walled off 2/3 of our empty cube space that was full pre-pandemic but is now vacant because all those employees remained remote. The positions in that area of the office were mostly copy editors, graphic design, and technical writers. The building owner turned that area into a new office but hasn't rented it to anyone new yet.

Many of my colleagues are active duty military and government civilians. They all telework as much as 3-4 days a week currently. All of their jobs are administrative in nature and almost all of the military people are officers.

It is important to note that the military has loosely instructed liberal telework at unit level discretion because of record low retention rates. I've been working in/for government for a long time and even before 2020, federal contractors and DoD civilians have usually had telework of some kind provided what they did was something that could be taken home.

When I worked in DC in the mid-00s it was common to see offices engage rotating flex schedules because of the insane traffic and hours long commutes in the DMV corridor.

But, I suppose it's all anecdotal. Where you live and what you do for work are going to impact reality more than anything. Watching the MSM speculate and reading nonsense opinion articles in the Atlantic or Times aren't going to give you any real information.

All I can say for sure is my office has fully remote and hybrid only. We are guaranteed two days WFH a week but all salaried employees have optional flex schedules and can work non-concurrent hours as long as deadlines are being met. But again, I work for a massive international fed contractor that does largely administrative and PR consulting. So all things that have a history of WFH schedules already.

It's called all the corporate leases on buildings in major cities. Wall Street bought up all the bonds surrounding those debts and with nobody needing to continue work in cities, those corporate real estate prices are about to crash really badly if they can't bring people back to cities. That means their balance sheets go out of wack and certain positions become untenable to maintain, not to mention they stand to loose a shit load of money. Hence everything saying its bad now, they need people to move back or their investments fall. It's not about productivity, emotional benefits, collaboration, but about wealth for the elites.

Real estate tycoons have a huge microphone

Yes, I have observed this and it is very frustrating. In many cases, these "articles" are opinion pieces being circulated by those with a financial interest in commercial real estate (or someone carrying the water of someone who has such an interest). Those who have any sort of financial interest in commercial real estate are going to be against remote work for obvious reasons.

Cities and real estate moguls arguing that people have to engage in an absolutely fruitless, draining, exhausting, expensive commute to keep a handful of people rich. They want to punish you to keep some elite people rich.

What needs to happen is workers need to fight back as much as possible. If your job can be done remotely, make it a priority to work for a company that allows you to do your job remotely. There's NOTHING about my job that requires me to go into an office. I have worked successfully at home for many years and if my organization required me to come in, I would do everything I could to leave and find something else that allowed me to telework. If you're looking for a job and have the luxury of being a little bit choosy, let recruiters know you will ONLY consider remote options.

Anecdotally, I think these opinion pieces are way overblown. My spouse was recently contacted by a recruiter about a job. The job was not remote and my spouse told the recruiter they would only consider remote-only options. The recruiter sighed and said, "That is what I keep getting told."

The news is propaganda. Welcome to the club.

Productivity was never the point of work. Increases in productivity thus was never a boon to those in charge.

Middle management wants to have a reason to exist. They want people driving to work spending money on the way there and back. Landlords care about their giant office buildings not being rented that should instead just be replaced with affordable housing.

A lot of these companies are locked in to 5,10 or 20 year leases. If they were sensible they'd just eat the loss and take the extra productivity and happier staff, but that's not how the corporate hivemind works. They're paying rent so they have to justify it by having bums on seats, or they're bleeding money for what looks like no reason.

It's simple, during the pandemic they couldn't have workers come in but they couldn't have just no work force so they pushed for work from home and made it seem like a big positive to keep money flowing into their pockets. Now that they can have people come into the office they need to justify their leases and justify their middle management oversight so they need people coming back to the offices. It's not about whats convent or comfortable for the workers, it's what can make them the most money and justify expenses as to not spook investors. If the company could cancel even half of their leases they would and have most everyone work from home and maybe even cut back on middle management. However they got 20-30 year leases to save money(in month to month payments) and it'd be really expensive to exit the deal sooooo justifying the lease is more important.