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The Absurdity of the Return-to-Office Movement::The return-to-office demands make little sense from an overall economic perspective, while working parents, in particular, benefit from not having to waste time commuting to an office, writes Peter Bergen.
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Biden just did this to federal agencies…
For no real reason, Republicans wanted it, but as soon as Biden did it, they shut up about it. Democrats don’t brag about it, because democratic voters hate it.
There was zero reason for it.
The number one thing conservatives hate is “Other People Having Agency” and other people not “Living By My Rules (that I don’t actually follow myself).”
People working at home and not having to be treated like a child who has to ask permission for a bathroom break is just too much for them to bear. If employees aren’t risking health issues by holding their piss in or just straight pissing themselves, they can’t handle it.
The reason Biden did it is because his donors wanted it..
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Someone’s clearly never been hit with a handful of overdraft fees at once
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Remote work forever, and repurpose the useless office buildings into conveniently located downtown living space to help ease housing shortages and drive urban density.
Then you need mass transit to pick up the slack, otherwise there’s just as much pollution and waste.
Correct. And that’s what will follow. Not a fast process, but it’ll happen.
I don’t get it. You need mass transit to stay home?
Fortunately those transit systems are densest in the urban cores so that may not be such an issue.
Living downtown typically means a lot more walking, biking, and public transit, precisely because you’re there in the middle of everything. When you’ve got everything from grocery stores, pubs, cafes, parks, cultural attractions, etc all within walking distance, your need to drive anywhere becomes occasional at most.
Who wants to live in a city centre though?
The only appeal is that it’s close to work, and we no longer need to go to that.
Because all the shops, museums, restaurants, music venues, and public transit hubs are there?
Museums and music venues, sure.
But the other things exist in small towns too. And if I do want to go to a concert, or the football or a museum, I can just go. It’s not like you go to these places every day.
I work from home and still prefer living in the city center, despite being more expensive. Not due to the museums but due to the closeness to restaurants, pubs and clubs. How am I supposed to go back home if I am drunk and I cannot drive. The city center is for the people not for office buildings.
This is me. I can just go outside and do the things, then I’m back in time for my next meeting.
Do they? I just moved back to the rural area I grew up in after spending ten years in Cleveland.
Cleveland’s not the greatest, but there’s dick around here outside of Walmart. I can drive 30 minutes into the nearest small city if I need a Home Depot or something, but Cleveland had tons of choices by comparison. Not a ton of restaurants, most are same ish or eaten up by Applebee’s. Fast food is even pretty limited.
Back in the day we had small shops, but most are dead now…
It’s also close to groceries, bars, theaters, museums, social services, and jobs that need you to be there in person, like working at any of the above.
We had cities before we had cars for a reason. Let’s make them somewhere we want to live.
It’s so nice to have everything within a 5 block radius. Everything I need is there. No cars, no traffic, just lots of constant exercise and fresh air. When I want to go to a museum, I go to a museum–no gas, driving, parking. When I want to go to a concert, I jump on the subway and go to a concert. But go on, tell us how living in suburbs and breathing the fumes from the car in front of you is better.
Nobody drives in the city, there’s too much traffic.
The one thing i disagree about is the fresh air
This isn’t 1980. Cities are really not polluted. Those who live in the suburbs tend to be less healthy due to lack of activity and increased exposure to the pollution emitted from cars.
If you are in the US or EU, maybe? Look at the third words though. This fresh air claim does not apply to everywhere in the world: especially when talking about downtown.
We’re going to take the exception and apply it to the whole, gotcha.
Looks like you love opening your mouth without thinking much so here are a few Actual stats before i block your ass.
I was not even disagreeing with you as a whole but apparently even arguing one point with you makes you entitled to a point you become defensive stale and resort to indulge in the mindset a 5 year old would be ashamed of.
https://www.unep.org/interactives/air-pollution-note/?gad_source=1
https://earth.org/data_visualization/pollution/
Now tell people again exactly how the air is actually fresh in cities, downtown, nonetheless where traffic is peaking. Adios.
Who said anything about living in the suburbs?
We didn’t all build our towns wrong.
Students
The ownership/management class sees Return To Office as a symbolic fight over class power. Who has the power, the worker class or the ownership class?
It has nothing to do with real hard numbers, efficiency, or really anything to do with rational choices at all. It has everything to do with the politics of who is considered to have the power in the modern workplace. The workers or the boss?
The ownership class knows how much they are stealing from the worker class so they really don’t want workers to start realizing how much agency and power they really do have if they work together as a class…
I think everybody needs to keep the conversation on forced RTO focused on this. Yes there are arguments that forced RTO is about commercial real estate property values and I am sure there is truth to that but we really need to see this story for the simple, broad collective story it is; we are in a class war, the rich know it and that is exactly why they don’t want to give in to the extremely reasonable accommodations of allowing workers to do their jobs remotely.
All they care about is the message it sends if they agree to worker demands, everything else including the reasonableness of the demands is noise to the people with the power and money.
I feel like they’re fighting an up hill battle against startups. If you’re a tech startup, you don’t have to invest in physical office space. You can hire competent people from anywhere. Pay them competitively and not have to drop 50K a month on a corporate office lease. It’s a minor edge in the long run, but something of an inevitability I think. Anyone genuinely competent realizes that if you force people to go into the office, you’re just gonna have people who dick around in the office and make idle conversation while staring at their phones instead of doing honest to God work.
I generally don’t care about going to the office, it’s not a problem, but what my company did was to hire 3x as many people as before the pandemic and simply move to hot desk system instead of expanding the office. So now we have more people but less desks and less parking spots. We have to use some app to make reservations and it’s just a constant struggle to book a desk so that I can sit next to guy I don’t know talking on a video call all day. What’s the fucking point?
Ooof fuck that.
Your bosses are idiots, gotcha.
What if one were to… reserve a desk and proceed to work from home? Possibly with a custom background that looks like the office :P
Ours made everyone come back to work at one office if they live within 60 miles. Datacenter floor is collapsing. Two areas are closed due to vermin being exterminated. Charmed life.
my wife has to go in 3 days a week as of January. she’s off this week as she said, quoth: “The fan that kept making more and more noise finally stopped working so I’m home all this week”
Rich people are having their fee-fees hurt because no one wants to (unnecessarily) come to the office
Rich people’s real estate investments would lose value if we suddenly didn’t need massive office buildings.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
We have met in person only twice in the year that the production has been up and running, and we have put out dozens of highly produced episodes, often featuring multiple guests, which go through many rounds of edits.
Banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and tech giants like Meta are demanding that their staff be back at the office several days a week.
Those return-to-office demands are often couched in non-falsifiable claims about the necessity of having chance encounters at the office where folks bounce creative, productive ideas off of each other.
The return-to-office demands also make little sense from an overall economic perspective at a time when a third of Americans who can do their job remotely now only work from home, up from only 7% before Covid, according to the Pew Research Center, yet the economy is very strong in terms of low unemployment and GDP growth.
This arrangement gives me a lot more time to spend with my kids, and if there is any kind of unforeseen emergency, I can be there for them in a way that, during the era of the office, I couldn’t be.
In fact, I have written several hundred of these columns over the past dozen years and I have never met most of the editors I work with, and yet I still have a warm, productive relationship with them.
The original article contains 820 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Did we really need spmeone to say this? Is it not self evident? If a company requires hybrid work for me it’s a huge red flag
I’m really in a “don’t give a shit” phase because there’s valid reasons for WFH as well at RTO and I’d argue those in the extreme on both sides are idiots.
That said, pragmatically everyone needs to understand the complexity of how we got here and no it’s not fully “the ruling class” demanding this. If we can’t justify commerical retail prices the economy is fucked and I mean that with a capital FUCKED.
Now the reasons for that are multifaceted but how it involves all of us not just the rich, many pension plans around the world have aggressively invested in real estate. Those pension plans are for average people like all of us here. If commercial real estate prices tank there goes social security. There goes your 401k. There goes your RRSP.
It’s very easy to blame an elite class but this problem is systemic and a result of how we have built the micro and macro economy.
So to those that are on the extreme on both sides, calm the fuck down.
I’m sorry but I’m not RTO because someone has made a bad investment. That’s between them and their bad investment.
The stone tools market will tank if we start smelting bronze!!!
Think about what it will mean to the economy if people can afford to buy a flat down town, though… it might make people’s lives better.
You realize if you pay taxes there’s a high likelihood that bad investment is on your head? If you are Canadian you contribute to the CPP. We have huge amounts invested in commercial real estate globally. If that value tanks there goes old age pensions for everyone. Is anyone ready to own that? Would you vote in someone that would make grandma and grandpa live on the streets? What about you when you reach retirement age?
There are solutions which include divesting in this poison pill but you think anyone can do that overnight?
I seriously question the expectations some people have. Try coordinating a get together with 20 people and see how hard it is then imagine that group exponentially increased. We are lucky we haven’t killed ourselves yet lol
The value of commercial buildings doesn’t go to zero. They’re just cut in half (based on recent sales prices).
Just because the price of an asset goes down doesn’t mean the economy crumbles. In fact, buyers / renters are now better off. I’m sure poor Grandmas are in that category.
Pensions are paid off based on the booked value. If the asset you own is worth half of what you paid for it that is a problem. If you bought a house for 1 million and you need to sell it to pay for something else and can only get 500k are you prepared for eating that loss?
Of course I can guess your answer because you probably feel you know better than the vast majority of governments and economists but that’s a moot point by now.
I’m not claiming to know the answer because I understand it’s complex enough to not.
What I am confident in is that despite what you or I say is but a drop in how serious the issue is. The difference is I’m not wasting energy screaming into the wind.
You really are invested in this topic, it’s odd.
No pension fund owns only commercial real estate. If anything, it’s like 5% of their entire portfolio. Still, it’s not necessarily a problem.
So in your simplified scenario, you have a pension paying retirees that owns 100% of a building. Say few businesses want to lease space in the building, and the value goes down.
They don’t have to sell the building. They can just refurbish it and put the retirees in it. That’s actually more tax efficient than paying the retirees who then pay their retirement home.
If governments and economists got us into this mess, then yeah, I guess we do know better than them.
According to the latest report from the CPP Investment Board, the Real Assets investment department managed $52 billion of real estate as of March 31, 2023 . This represented about 9.1% of the total net assets of $570 billion .
The CPP is considered to be one of, if not the best investment, and most stable option in the entire world.
My retirement position is 100% in the U.K, where state pensions (pitiful as they are) are pay-as-you-go (ie the contributions of the current labour market are used to pay the current retirees). There is no collective state fund that accumulates and then later pays out. I have a personal pension, like most, which doesn’t have a defined position in real estate (although I’m sure some of the stocks in the fund would be affected by a real estate crash, both up and down).
So yeah, like most people, I don’t want to socialise losses in somebody else’s investment nor do I expect anyone to come and rescue my personal pension if it tanks based on some global change.
This problem is systemic because the rich made it so.
LOL I can’t believe I just watched someone “both sides” the RTO argument.
