this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Work Reform
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I agree with the article that real estate is at the core of the issue. Always follow the money.
However, I also think some mid-level supervisor types get off on the power trip of making subordinates do things they don't want to do, such as wasting several hours a week commuting and polluting between home and office.
And of course you'll always have the suckups who want to score points by acting so eager to show up in person. They are the reason it's so hard to unify and fight these measures in many shops.
I'm not talking about people who have a genuine preference for working in the office. There are many legitimate reasons to have such a preference. I'm talking about psychos who want to force everyone to do it when it's not necessary, and don't support telecommuting as a legitimate way to work.
From what I've seen, every push to have everyone return to the office has either been that they just want control over employees or they want butts in seats because the seats aren't free. It's never been about productivity as folks that work from home normally are always happy to drive in to the office if they have to. What's the different if they drive in during morning rush hour traffic vs at lunch time when they only have to physically be in the office for a few hours.
I think a large part of the push for return to work is definitely the control of employees when management actively selects for people who are sociopaths.
Yes, exactly.
Everyone keeps pointing to the real estate issue, but the simple fact of the matter is that most office-based employers don't own any commercial real estate. It's a great theory as to why the media has been promoting back-to-office stories, but it doesn't explain why employers are actually doing it.
Raw, unmitigated distrust of and disrespect for employees, though...
That's not a fact. The reality is that all these rich assholes are friends with each other. The owner of the business is friends with the owner of the building and friends with the owner of the vendors and friends with the owner of the retailers. They all go on camping trips and to each other's kids weddings.
The owner of the business renting the office space might not literally own the building, but they're all friends.
Most of them are not. The reality is, workers in the US are more or less equally split between big businesses and small-to-medium businesses, and outside of the States it skews much more toward small-to-medium. These are companies that often have less than amicable relationships with their landlords, because landlords have this nasty tendency of acting like landlords.
On top of that, much commercial real estate is owned by REITs, which are managed from the biggest cities, and aren't really entities small and medium businesses get to have real relationships with, any more than an apartment renter gets to have a relationship with their residential REIT.
They're not buddies. They don't even have a direct line of contact.
I guess I believe you that it's like that in much of the world, but in the US small to medium businesses are very "family oriented." The richest people in a small city/area are very interconnected with personal relationships.
Also it looks good for client-facing businesses. Clients like it better when they can see the peons that will be working for them - a lot of them don't like to accept "well our employees have lives and it's better and easier for us to simply have them WFH rather than maintaining a huge office space for the sole reason of having an office."