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The data is clear. Workers are happier, and more productive at home. Huge benefits to society and environment as well.
The only exception seems to come from those who live alone and where work is their only physical social contact.
My work lost decades of experienced workers forcing people back to office with long commutes.
The idea of people hauling ass all the way in to the office only to sit on zoom calls—sometimes with people in the same office—simply blows my mind.
A close person to me is sueing their employer for ADA violations because they became disabled during the pandemic while working full time WFH but now the office is RTO and they won't give them an exception to continue to WFH which is a clear ADA violation because they could do their job 100% without the accommodation when they worked for over 5 years remote.
Having oversight is not an essiental function of a job if you have ever in the past been able to accomplish the work 100% remotely.
Boy I hope they win this shit out of this.
We need to pass a law requiring employers to pay twice the payroll tax contribution for any office worker that they require to work in the office.
And then they'll cut everyone else's salary in half.
Pay is a tricky flexible thing that varies per person and has a million exceptions. Laws on salary generally don't work; politicians have taken us for a ride.
The only thing that will protect our pay regardless of inflation and legalese BS is to change the supply and demand equilibrium with a union.
I've been told it's a better experience to book conference rooms instead of us just being able to be remote on zoom or teams for things that require screensharing. Cause it's not like half the meeting is getting that room working 🙄.
But yeah in office is so much better
There have been a few times when it was useful being able to see the whites of their eyes, but generally, there's no benefit besides knowing how tall people are, and (not always a benefit) being aware of how they smell.
For difficult line-management conversations, though, face-to-face is better, although there was one guy who got spun up to the point where a physical altercation was possible-- luckily, I talked him down. He was having mental-health issues, his work was suffering, but didn't want a paid leave of absence so he could get his shit sorted. He was afraid we'd sack him while he was on leave (which we don't do). That problem solved itself after he had an episode outside working hours and got sectioned. He resigned while he was being treated. Luckily it wasn't the US, where police too often shoot people when they're having a crisis.
What makes you think that employers actually care if you're happy? Or that they care about society or the environment?
The only exception seems to come from those who live alone and where work is their only physical social contact.
I have colleagues with small kids at home. They like coming into the office because the nippers distract them too much.
My employer tried imposing post-Covid RTO mandates on us, compliance was slow and reluctant, but they soon realized that they were better off selling off and/or subletting the massive office space we had. Now, a new RTO mandate would be impossible to implement because there aren't enough desks or floor space. And that's just fine. Our capex is much lower, opex has gone down a bit too. It's absurd anyway. My team is mainly made up of contractors, my customers are also non-local, they're based in different cities, so my meetings with them have to be online whether I WFH or I'm in the office. I'd rather be at home, the coffee is better and I can take conjugal breaks without distressing my coworkers.
the people with the most options are often the first to leave. The employees who remain may not be the most committed — they may simply be the least mobile.
This has been called the Dead Sea Effect.
What remains, in all cases, is usually very salty.
And often smelly.
I asked my boss why the company insisted we show up three times a week. It was basically to justify the cost of putting the buildings there, maybe some kind of tax benefits. She called it "funny money". I quit my job.
My firm responded by remodeling the office to make smaller offices and a lot more communal workspace, and giving three of the six floors back to the management company.
It sure killed the last tiny iota I had left. My company had some WFH before COVID, we all did 6 years full WFH until just recently, they also announced a big "WFH is the future!" Thing last year. Then this year changed their minds and issued an RTO mandate.
I could MAYBE understand working in the same building if my whole team all worked directly together on the same project and we were all in the office, but a giant chunk of the company is all over the country, 3/4 my team is remote, but me and a few unlucky chumps have to drive in to join the video calls from a conference room that never connects correctly and is 10x harder to hear and communicate in.
But this is "for collaboration" we were told. It's been almost a year now and I have yet to have an 100% in person meeting or any meaningful collaboration or anything positive really. It's cost me more money, cost me and the company a lot of wasted time sitting in a car, it made work 10x slower and harder to do, my mental health dropped drastically and a ton of our best coworkers all left and the extra work got dumped on us that stayed.
It's hell. I also "quietly quit" because they don't even care about actual work getting done, only if everyone looks busy and the spreadsheet numbers look all pretty. I used to work hard and enjoyed my job, not anymore, and RTO + strict helicopter management is the cause.
Get a P.O. Box way away from the office. Say you moved. Open bank account in county of said P.O box. Bam back to wfh...and you don't have to move. If they ask why you still have your home, tell them your renting it out.
My former employer did RTO with 2 weeks notice, no exceptions. A coworker who had actually moved to a different state moved their family again to comply, only to be laid off months later.
I had sold my car and planned to never own another. Plus the few times I had been in the office were awful, managing virtual meetings with coworkers around and overseas, listening to a sales rep in the next cubicle discussing how best to defraud their customers, etc. I loved that job and my boss fought hard for my ability to stay remote, but they were convinced 100% RTO is the only way to survive the tariffs.
They hiring? I'm perfectly willing to come in to an office and act like I'm doing stuff in exchange for money.
Only if you're an AI agent. Humans, nope.
Could I just tell them I'm Artificially Intelligent? I'm awful at being human, but great at seeming intelligent and hard working for 30 seconds at a time with several hours between each instance.
they asked if I had a degree in theoretical physics. I said I have a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.
I'm not really this smart, it's all an act. I'm Artificially Intelligent.
It sure killed the last tiny iota I had left.
Long ago, I had colleagues who got fucked over by our employer, and they expressed surprise that, after all the loyalty they'd shown to the company, they'd be treated that way. Being a bit of a rescue dog myself, I was perplexed that they'd ever believed that their company felt loyalty to them, the same as the loyalty they felt to the company. These were otherwise intelligent people.
That's a feature of exploitation: the system rewards sociopathy.
I’ve grown to absolutely despise my employer over this. I work for the federal government as a “manager” in a call center, and over the last couple of years we’ve gone from full‑time WFH to being forced back into the office 80% of the time.
I understand that a lot of employers are doing this to push people out, especially now with budget cuts and mass layoffs happening in the government. But that wasn’t the original reason. They did it because corporations and wealthy business owners complained about losing downtown business in major cities. (They wrote an open letter to the government lol)
The fact that my employer is willing to make employees’ lives worse just to appease the rich is revolting. Fuck them and fuck the rich.
What makes me even angrier is how easily everyone accepted it. We could have pushed back. We could have simply continued doing our jobs from home, they can't fire everyone. Instead, people just complained but complied.
Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to go along with it. The idea of being used as a pawn to make the rich happy made me furious. So I just didn’t go. And I didn’t enforce the rule with my team either. For a while, this worked. My boss would talk to me, I’d explain that I was at least 60% less productive in the office, I’d promise to start going, show up for a month, then stop again.
Eventually they escalated things and dragged me into a fact‑finding meeting with HR. At that point, I had no choice, they were monitoring my attendance daily. I can’t afford to lose this job; the pay is good and there aren’t many alternatives in my area. But simply giving in wasn’t an option either.
So I started calling virtual doctors until I found one willing to properly fill out a duty‑to‑accommodate form. It cost me $150, but it worked. They approved me for full‑time work‑from‑home for medical reasons.
It sucks that it had to come to this, and it sucks even more that other employees weren’t willing to push back. But my mental health couldn’t handle going to the office just to be less productive and to satisfy the demands of people who already have more than enough.
The fed rto was just insane. (Obligatory “fuck elmo muskrat and his little doggies.”) Employees were being called back to buildings with no furniture, or no heat, or no internet; one person was called back to an “office” in the parking garage, another to a storage unit with a forest service boat in it, another to the front lawn of the building. Insanity.
What makes me even angrier is how easily everyone accepted it. We could have pushed back. We could have simply continued doing our jobs from home, they can’t fire everyone. Instead, people just complained but complied.
This also frustrates me.
There's no labor organization or solidarity here. Some people are afraid they'll lose their job and then suffer. That's a real fear, because this is the bad place
But some people are just spineless
We need to come together as communities and take care of those that are fired. Then people will be more willing. It always comes down to solidarity and solidarity in a rabidly individualistic society is lacking.
Why the hell would there be any reason to have call-center staff, of all people, be forced to be in the office? That's just brutally stupid.
. I can’t afford to lose this job; the pay is good and there aren’t many alternatives in my area.
To be fair to your coworkers, they probably had the same reasonings. They just weren't willing to fake a doctor's note to get out of it.
Over-emphasizing metrics about employee submission and control is another clear sign of the decay of social order under capitalism. This is a society whose organizing functions have no direct concern for people’s wellbeing. These employers deserve every scrap of contempt they foster.
Its not just bad for the people that were working from home, but for the people that didn't have the option as well. Being able to come to work and put on music, having clean restrooms and space in the break room, the low amount of commuting traffic. Now everyone is forced back and it sucks so much being crowded again and spending twice the amount of time getting to and from work.
We are lead by the emotions of idiots, and the greed of monsters.
We have leadership who do not understand how work gets done. They don't do work like their employees do. They don't code or do code reviews.
In 2019, debating with a COO that didn't want any WFH at all, I said that requiring people to sit in front of you to work is saying that you don't trust them and that you don't know how to manage them or measure their output.
He didn't accept it, but had no rebuttal. I wonder if he's learned any of that by now.
There's a lot of nuance with this, but for most office jobs it's true.
We had a jackass CIO come in and do this prior to covid. Turned our 6 year policy of 3 days/week wfh into absolutely NO wfh. Told everyone on a friday that it started monday. People had moved 2+ hours away to live cheaper. They'd drive in on a Monday, stay the night, work Tuesday, and then go home until the next week.
What he quickly found out was it pissed all of us off. He couldn't get anyone to come in at any time because we all refused to carry our laptops home anymore. If we weren't at work, we weren't working. He tried pulling some bullshit a few times but each time HR surprisingly backed up his absolute no wfh policy he made them drill into us and stand firm on in many cases.
I left within a year after that and over the next two years they had a 50% turn over rate, all the top brass eventually got fired including the CIO but the damage is done. Last I heard they brought in a "morale expert" to keep people from breaking down in the hallways daily.
How do you become a "Morale Expert?" Is he the guy who applies the beatings until morale improves, or the guy who advises that it's probably not a good strategy? Or are the Morale Experts of both kinds, so a company can choose to hire the Morale Expert that best suits their "Corporate Culture?"
Fucking useless corporate bullshit. Anything to keep from paying their employees properly.
After SIX years fully remote my agency is now death rolling us into rto. First it was "just once a month", then "well only once a week", and now "two days a week isn't bad!" and it's absolute bullshit. I've heard my direct manager and director both say we returned to the office to "make our new building look full" (that started construction AFTER we went full remote) and "to socialize." Fuck them.
The worst part though? Our new building is ALL open office/open table spaces with no privacy bullshit. I cannot explain how fucking terrible that is to anyone who hasn't experienced it. If you still have cubicles, consider them a luxury.
Cubicles were often seen as the most hellish form of office design... It is crazy to think how things are becoming so that people are fucking looking back at them with nostalgia...
That's the way it used to be, all the desks just lined up in room, the supervisor at the front facing them, like a classroom. They were all men, too, unless typing was involved.
The Sociopathic Oligarchs want to take us back to the olden days of routine employee abuse.
I cannot explain how fucking terrible that is to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. If you still have cubicles, consider them a luxury.
I've worked with people that would innocently say about "open plans" - "well, at least it's not a cubicle farm". Also, I've had co-workers that liked/advocated for for those "cubicles" that are less than waist-high. I've been in some corporate shops where the cubicle walls were about 8 feet high, and honestly, short of having real offices, they are far better than having an open plan. Cubicles get a bad rap since things can always be worse.
I cannot even comprehend wanting to have an "open plan" and trying to do knowledge work. I've done it, and I absolutely hated it. Some people even had the fucking balls to ask why I used headphones. In open plans, virtually any passer-by can just "drop-in" for a quick chat if you are near a high-traffic area, like, say, a printer.
It's not like there was a social contract before that. Management always resort to whatever they can get away with, and unless the workers organize to resist them, they can get away with a lot.
The social contract was "pay us properly and we won't burn your factory down". Our compromise was unions. But yes, we lost that contract some 40 years ago and our pitchforks grew dull, distracted by the usual culture wars brought out to divide the working class.
A company is not a person. The only trust you should ever have in a company is that it will always do what is best for the board.
Sometimes treating employees well is best for the company, but that can change in an instant.
Just middle to upper management and real estate investors conspiring to justify their phoney-baloney jobs at the expense of the worker.
They're now dependent on bailouts in order to out-compete new companies that don't waste money.
Oh, good. Wouldn't want the actual realities of capitalism to get in the way of late-stage capitalist monopolies refusing to innovate.
Just work for companies that don’t have offices, simple as.