[[. They were hired for office work]]
Exactly! Who gives a rip if the workers don’t want to go back- fire em and hire office workers Instead if they refuse.
Hope the co panties don’t cave in like the universities are and capitulate to the demands of the workers. The workers do not run the company, the boss does, and when the boss says back to work, that’s it- either go back to work of find another job
You are assuming that workers are commodities.
The worker leaves and finds another job. What does the employer do? Finds, interviews, hires, onboards, trains and then waits for that new employee to gain the experience the old one has in order to get productivity just back to where it was, never mind any improvement.
All those steps above cost money. You cannot just plug in a new body into a skilled position and expect equal results. Heck, I'm working with newly hired people who are quite intelligent, skilled, and willing, and it still takes months to get them up to speed on the job.
Basically, it's not as easy as you make it out to be, and workers do indeed have a say in how companies are run--at least they do in the better run companies.
There is no "back to the office" for workers who were never there. We've expanded our team to hire from three states away and the remote workers are far better than the locals. It's not even close.