this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
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- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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This is a conspiracy theory. For this hypothesis to be true, it would take all companies and and real estate companies to cooperate. This is something people are likely to believe because it is an us vs them theory. But in practice they are incapable of doing it.
The problem is that real estate companies and lending companies have competing interests. Real estate companies want people to go back to office, obviously. But other companies would save loads of money by going full remote. The current lease is irrelevant, because the money is already lost, and it won't be recovered if people go back to office. The sunk cost fallacy is not a fallacy any decent company will fall for. People though will easily believe they do, especially when they are not protecting themselves from it.
My hypothesis is that management and direction are controle freaks who cannot trust their employees. They are also aroogant. This leads to a situation where they will attribute any productivity benefit during remote work to their skills and decisions, and they will attribute any decrease to employee lazyness when they're not closely monitored. They want to correct this by bringing people back to office to appease their mind. There is reaction to change too, obviously, but I suppose it simply takes the shape I described, the shape of distrust of employees.
Not all, just a lot of them. That is not hard to imagine, since the same companies who are the biggest investors in real estate (commercial or residential for that matter) are also the biggest institutional owners of the stock of public companies. The point is, the ownership of all this converges at Wall Street, and that's where this goes one way or another.
No, because then one company would exploit this. And it would still be a big loss for the companies not owning the real estate.
They all collaborated on coordinated layoffs, which was blamed on blind by potential insiders in vanguard pressuring CEOs and I don't think any tech company skipped the order.
Some companies continued WFH, some were full remote even before the pandemic. They are shown to be very competitive in their markets. OTOH, many RTO companies have been shown to be hurt b their RTO policies, but leadership didn't care. Insiders usually point to commercial real estate investments as the reason, where the owners decided they themselves will lose less money if their companies tank a bit, but their other investments don't take a dive.
It's not even a conspiracy at this point. Sure, there are weird middle manager types and people who hate being at home and all that, but the main driving force behind institutional change at megacorps is not Joe the team lead with 6 rungs above him and one below on the corporate ladder.
Exploit higher costs and lower productivity paying for office space?