And buried in the middle of the article:
“He and his colleagues believe that the company’s move was the result of workers’ decision to unionize.”
This very much was because they unionized.
Unions are all about give and take. You negotiate what you want and what you’ll give up.
I believe a primary driver of this is the enormous commercial real estate bubble that is going to destroy the economy and is looking very large right now. That and of course greed.
This argument never made sense to me. Why would greedy companies voluntarily pay for something they don’t need just to support some “greater good” of keeping the economy afloat? It means reduced profits yet the “contribution” of each individual company is just drop in the bucket.
It would make sense if the executives making the order to return to the office also have commercial real estate portfolios.
Then it would be just moving profits from one pocket to another.
IMHO it can’t explain the industry trend.
It doesn’t make sense because it’s some conspiracy theory level bullshit. It would imply that big CEOs or board members either:
- Possess a big percentage of the current real estate properties (and I mean, huge, like 50%)
- Big part of their assets are in real estate (again, more than 30%)
And, that of course, they are all colluding. Meaning, there is a kind of Illuminati kind of society of all the CEOs that get together with pie charts and excels to see how to maximize their profits.
It’s a delusion that people with a low grasp of reality are using to cope with the fact that:
- Economy is shit
- There are people that, because of connection and money, are unscathed by the economic shitinnes we live in
- Because the economy is shit, companies are grasping to get out of red numbers
- Because we have had mediocre to sheerly bad managers in almost every industry for most of the last three decades thanks to some economic bonanzas, the only way they see they can improve the margins is by doing stupid things like back to office
I like Hanlon’s razor for these cases: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I this, I feel, is indeed that.
It’s complicated but mostly made up argument.
It varies company to company. An old company I worked at we got a tax break for how many employees we had in the office. (Pre-Covid)the idea was to encourage us to move employees from other officers into the downtown office.
If everyone is working remotely, you don’t get those tax benefits.
The main reason I’ve seen is habit. We have been going to an office for a long time and it’s about control. They want to watch their workers.
Now what interesting is people are suing because they’re working from home. It’s increased their cost and they want the employer to pay it.
Exactly. Hence government intervention needed, unfortunately
