For the sake of argument, let's say that COVID is over. Let's say that it has been eradicated. OK, awesome. I'm really struggling to wrap my head around the fact why that means we have to round up all of the office workers and force them to return to their little cubicles ASAP, when the past two years have been one of the greatest developments in the workers rights movement since the 40 hour work week.
It really just seems like the bourgeois (and PMC) want to strip away every bit of autonomy over our own lives we've gained since the beginning of this pandemic (and this is just for those of us who are privileged enough to work remotely)
My company literally just announced a plan to phase out hybrid work (two days in the office, three days remote) with the hopes of eventually returning to normal (five days a week in the office).
How is this shit sticking
Working from home sounds nice and all, but I saw a business guy get quoted saying something to the effect that "If i'm paying some guy to work from home out of Boulder, why shouldn't I pay people to work from home out of Dhaka?"
Work from home is popular because you don't have to commute or interact with Eichman's as often, but I wonder if there's a peril we haven't realized yet, where Work from Home is weaponised against the worker, another innovation to pay less for labor by sourcing it from the global south. In fact, Here's a Planet Money story from 2019, about how some in Silicon valley are looking to hire people in Mexico to code remotely, for considerably less of course.
I wonder about this too. I also worry that this will accelerate the trend of jobs becoming gigs. It seems easier for employers to isolate remote employees and force them to work as contractors or gig workers.
I think one or two half days a week for meetings and team stuff for individual contributor roles is more than enough
And mitigates that tradeoff of dhaka to some degree, but being in the office 5 days a week doesn’t stop that either
This is just the "if we have to raise minimum wage I'll replace all my employees with robots" argument. If it really made sense they would have already done it, and if it's really that much cheaper for them in the future they'll do it anyways regardless.