A lot of people bring up the free market forces, but mention it mostly in terms of the tension between employer and employee, and the forces of supply and demand. But in competative markets, those businesses that have the most efficient and productive human capital should have an advantage. In that regard, the real discerning factor is which type of industry you work in. If you can reduce overhead by not having to maintain as much capital, but you can keep productivity and output, then you should have increased margins (actually not a margin, which is cost of sale versus revenue, but anyway) then you can afford to make your product more competitive, or to compensate your best people more, or maybe even both. If you work in a restaurant, or the service/hospitality sector, you don’t have much room to do that. Also, not very much with the trades or with manufacturing. If you deal in the knowledge sector or financial sector or brokering, probably so, but then you need good metrics on productivity, which those sectors tend to have anyway, and people don’t usually fake-it-til-they-make-it in those fields.
Businesses in competitive markets that are driven to succeed will weigh these options, or so I should think. If you can afford to be woke, maybe you don’t have much competition, and you should be focused on optimizing your position instead.
I completely agree that it it works, and a sober analysis is done, that there are many jobs that could done remotely and a company will benefit from it.
In my particular industry, they had been looking at a partial work from home option about a year before COVID landed, and we were well positioned from technical planning, budgeting, and workflow perspectives to begin and expand it.
It was done because the specialties primarily under consideration COULD do a degree of remote work, and it was being looked at as a recruitment tool and life balance improvement.
The point is, my employer had been looking at it from early on as something that could benefit both the employer and employee, analyzed and implemented it with that in mind, rather than having a figurative gun pointed at their heads by employee demands.
In our case, it was a win-win scenario for all involved and had nothing to do with being forced to do so. But circumstances, workflows and conditions are different not only within our industry, but across industries.