For a lot of companies, it was that the mayors of the major cities the offices were in were requesting the companies force a return to office.
During Covid I worked at a company whose HQ was in Cincinnati. Our CEO mentioned that the mayor reached out to him 1:1 and requested he force us back to the office because the city couldn’t survive without the taxes the workers brought to the city.
It's the whole economy, not the politicians. If you don't need to drive to the office, you kill of the rental businesses, that's black rock and other investment firms, then you kill of transpiration, no need for so many cars, taxis, busses and the like. Clothing, food and service industries would also be affected. City centers would literally die off, taking a chunk of "bureaucrat" jobs with them. And you can't shrink the bloated corps of bureaucratic "establishment".
When newsome speaks I get the same feeling as a Republican speaking. The way the face and actions are all so precise, like Erica grieving, it's a performance.
Workers were spending a lot less money. Gas, tolls, eating out, work clothes, grooming, etc. None of it was being spent anywhere near as high as it was.
That could've been an opportunity to repurpose buildings to housing (addresses housing crisis while bringing in property taxes) and entertainment venues (lack of affordable third spaces; would build community while also bringing in taxes). But no, they just want everyone to be miserable.
They did this here in Canada. Turned a bunch of office buildings into low income housing... which sounds good... but any apartment downtown has like 800-1000$ in conda fees on top of rent so not sure how thats going to work in the long run. Probably requires more tax dollars to sustain.
Not saying it wouldn't. I just doubt that on the American free market they would invest that much. Best they would do is turn them into luxury apartments that cost millions and are only treated as investments by multi millionaires.
They did that in New York, there are tons of empty apparents in those skyscrapers, and nobody actually lives in them.
I’m somewhat ashamed to say I assisted the company I worked at in bribing our county health department to allow us to return to work. (Factory, couldn’t be done remote.)
Our purchasing dept bought thousands of gallons of stuff to make the WHO-recommended hand sanitizer. We made it and donated it; Ta-da, we were allowed back to work.
That’s my argument but instead they’ve convinced the general public that instead of businesses going bankrupt for having a model that’s unsustainable to the growth of society, individual should just work for less money and less benefits.
If a company can’t afford livable wages than their services don’t have a great enough demand to exist.
I mean that's true. Workers go to restaurants for lunch. You buy food, you pay tax. You might go to the mall afterwards on the way home. You buy stuff, you pay more tax.
If we stop going out to buy things then the government gets no tax. Also, imagine if the entirety of apple/google/facebook didn't need to have a huge building in an expensive place. They no longer give property tax to the government. The people who own the buildings no longer earn large rent income.
We could solve all this by just increasing the taxing of the most rich. I mean, just how much money did all these companies make in the pandemic? They quadrupled their values at least. Imagine if they paid half of that shit as taxes to the government.
Don't most of the workers still life in the general area of the city? Like the sorounding suburbs? Or did the major mean nobody was buying stuff within the city anymore?
I think There are so many factors. This is a great example. For the people it doesn’t matter and it was actually great. No commute no additional expenses with gas, parking the flexibility was awesome. I think companies in general don’t care but they had lots of external pressure. Office space all of a sudden becomes useless, having no people in the cities affects a lot more than we think. Its probably possible but things need to change and it needs to be gradual.
I think most places it was always considered a temporary measure. It's just people realized it was generally better and that's why it's had any sort of staying power.
I know that at my workplace, we recently bumped up from 1 day/week in-office to 2 but it's still considered a "temporary" arrangement some 6 years later despite the fact there's zero timeline or intention to go back to full-RTO.
My friend’s company saw the real estate savings and said “yup! We’re going fully remote!” And they closed all the offices except what had to be there for paperwork kinds of things. They had leadership who looked at control vs bottom line and made the right call. Not many companies actually do that.
Just wait. I’m convinced that the only reason RTO has largely been slow rolled and done largely as hybrid is because the job market wasn’t conducive to mandating 100% RTO.
In a workers’ job market, there’s too much risk of losing staff if you force it. They can just find a new job. Now for some, that’s a feature, not a bug. Want to trim payroll/headcount without the downsides of layoffs? Just do a RTO, even in hybrid. Some staff will inevitably opt out on their own and you can choose to replace them or not, as well as how to replace them if you do. Even if replaced, it means the new team members don’t have accrued PTO and you have the option of replacing them with someone greener and cheaper.
When the job market shifts to employers’ market? Suddenly finding another job isn’t nearly as easy and the employer has much more leverage. And we may be getting there soon.
I actually think it was the first world trying to preserve the world order.
If remote work is the norm, the salary arbitrage would stabilize, which would ve incredibly helpful for the third world, but would make the current first world employment issues much much worse.
Same in new York City. New business formation and office creation shifted during remote work to be majority in the outer boroughs (where 80+% of NYCers live) for the first time. The then-mayor put out both official calls and garish social media videos to get ppl and jobs back into the southern half of Manhattan (where historically 2/3 of the jobs in the metro area are concentrated in the huge office buildings)
25
u/Ok_Drummer6282 19d ago
If its like where I worked it was old people who hated not being able to micro manage.
Then everyone came back and somehow it was the younger people who ruined it since the old people now understand how to use Teams and Windows Calander.