You either come back to the office or you don’t have a job. That sounds good to me.
>You either come back to the office or you don’t have a job. That sounds good to me.
How’s “give up on your stupid disease-spreading centralized leftist-collectivist work cube fantasies or the people that make “your money” happen keep working but for themselves or someone else” sound?
The change happened when communications tech reached the point where collaboration was possible at a high level. All that was needed was a catalyst.
On a purely pecuniary basis, costs are incurred for each office employee by *someone*:
- Office space
- Office equipment above those needed for individual work (copiers/printers, conference equipment, trash/shredders, cleaning, electricity/heating/cooling)
- Time spent in commute
- Costs of commuting hardware (depends on locale; often parking, car wear and tear+gasoline, could be train or other conveyance, sometimes airfare!)
- Costs of food consumed in office environment (ranging from lunch to entire per diem costs, plus ‘perk’ or individually-purchased snacks, coffee/tea/whatever)
- Costs of work attire and maintenance/cleaning thereof, and other personal effects.
- Costs of transit within/during work (remember when people took 15 minutes to assemble and start the next meeting because they all needed to walk to the other conference room, grab coffee, use the restroom, be interrupted by something, arrive, and do their social things?)
(none of that even touches on the intangibles like not being mugged, not breathing smog, being there for family, not bothering others with one’s own music, dress, participation on FR, not putting up with office-y leftist propaganda, etc.)
I might be missing some but you get the idea. So we all know that if a cost is imposed by tax or necessity on a company, they embed that cost in the price charged to their consumer, right? So either a) these are costs incurred by the company and therefore in the former category or b) they are costs incurred by the employee who ... wait for it ... likewise embeds this in the cost of being employed by this company and requires a salary commensurate, which means the employer is paying anyway, which means their consumer is paying these costs anyway.
Lo and behold, since communication tech is pervasive, the employer is competing for this employee on a large scale. If company X wants employees in the office and paying $A, but company Y wants remote employees and is paying $A, the employee is able to realize that they’re making less money with company X. That’s why there’s no putting that egg back in its shell.
Obviously this varies — if the job is actually hands-on you have to be hands-on; if something is being made someone has to be there to make it or process it; stuff doesn’t package itself or drive itself around; and neither the article nor the above is about those jobs at all. Nobody had to convince an electrician to go to where the wiring needs done; the only challenge is getting the leftist lockdown/mandate/mask/testing insanity boot off our necks.