Technology

The ownership/management class sees Return To Office as a symbolic fight over class power. Who has the power, the worker class or the ownership class?

It has nothing to do with real hard numbers, efficiency, or really anything to do with rational choices at all. It has everything to do with the politics of who is considered to have the power in the modern workplace. The workers or the boss?

The ownership class knows how much they are stealing from the worker class so they really don't want workers to start realizing how much agency and power they really do have if they work together as a class...

I think everybody needs to keep the conversation on forced RTO focused on this. Yes there are arguments that forced RTO is about commercial real estate property values and I am sure there is truth to that but we really need to see this story for the simple, broad collective story it is; we are in a class war, the rich know it and that is exactly why they don't want to give in to the extremely reasonable accommodations of allowing workers to do their jobs remotely.

All they care about is the message it sends if they agree to worker demands, everything else including the reasonableness of the demands is noise to the people with the power and money.

Remote work forever, and repurpose the useless office buildings into conveniently located downtown living space to help ease housing shortages and drive urban density.

I generally don't care about going to the office, it's not a problem, but what my company did was to hire 3x as many people as before the pandemic and simply move to hot desk system instead of expanding the office. So now we have more people but less desks and less parking spots. We have to use some app to make reservations and it's just a constant struggle to book a desk so that I can sit next to guy I don't know talking on a video call all day. What's the fucking point?

Ours made everyone come back to work at one office if they live within 60 miles. Datacenter floor is collapsing. Two areas are closed due to vermin being exterminated. Charmed life.

Rich people are having their fee-fees hurt because no one wants to (unnecessarily) come to the office

Did we really need spmeone to say this? Is it not self evident? If a company requires hybrid work for me it's a huge red flag

This is the best summary I could come up with:

We have met in person only twice in the year that the production has been up and running, and we have put out dozens of highly produced episodes, often featuring multiple guests, which go through many rounds of edits.

Banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and tech giants like Meta are demanding that their staff be back at the office several days a week.

Those return-to-office demands are often couched in non-falsifiable claims about the necessity of having chance encounters at the office where folks bounce creative, productive ideas off of each other.

The return-to-office demands also make little sense from an overall economic perspective at a time when a third of Americans who can do their job remotely now only work from home, up from only 7% before Covid, according to the Pew Research Center, yet the economy is very strong in terms of low unemployment and GDP growth.

This arrangement gives me a lot more time to spend with my kids, and if there is any kind of unforeseen emergency, I can be there for them in a way that, during the era of the office, I couldn’t be.

In fact, I have written several hundred of these columns over the past dozen years and I have never met most of the editors I work with, and yet I still have a warm, productive relationship with them.

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