this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
433 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
60071 readers
3589 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.