The worst part of the RTO push is how little anyone involved cares.
This applies mostly to workers who keep talking about it but do nothing, emboldening decision-makers within organizations who see employee inaction as a widow to mandate RTO.
When workers stomp and yell about RTO, and these pleas go unheard, workers always fall back to suggesting that:
- The company is losing its best people.
- The company is suffering from low morale.
- The company will be delivering more slowly and with lower quality.
- The company has lost its institutional knowledge.
These are all true. However, a company would sooner destroy itself than reconsider remote work.
Because the people who decide who comes back into the office, even after telling everyone they are fully remote and hiring people remotely, are less interested in people or the health of their company. They need a place to release the desire for power and control, a place to escape from their personal life, a place for networking and socialization, a place to feed their ego and narcissism, a place to resolve concerns about a failing commercial real estate market, and on and on and on.
But you can’t argue any of those things to those decision makers.
You will never prove those claims as accurate. That leaves you with ad hominem attacks against people who can easily deflect the conversion back to collaboration, better together, or plain old “fuck you” when they are backed into a corner.
Dell told remote workers that they would not be eligible for promotion if workers did not come back to the office. When people shrugged that off, Dell said, “LOL, come back or get out.”
Amazon employees signed petitions, and that had zero impact. How many Amazon workers quit out of protest? If they did, and I presume they didn’t, who cares? Amazon can find other people all over the world. Everyone wants to work at Amazon.
Walmart and JP Morgan, two companies representing the worst of our society, invested hundreds of millions to build new offices instead of taking that money and giving it directly to workers to improve their standard of living and quality of life.
So where do they leave workers?
Being fired for insubordination will not help you with finding your next job. You may as well hit up LinkedIn to praise that new office space, boot-licking for the opportunity to feel like you are working at home while not at home. Then, put in 50 to 60 hours a week, and maybe your chances of being promoted or getting a raise will rise from never to probably never.
And nobody should blame workers for keeping quiet and dragging ass into an office. Have you seen who filled jobs in 2024? The government, healthcare, and construction.
Healthcare and construction are always on-site, and the Elon administration is ending remote work for government employees.
Do you still want to put your job at risk? We all know how difficult it is for the average worker to land a new offer. It will take you more than 200 applications over 6 to 12 months.
Ultimately, you will take that warehouse job at night for that sweet nighttime differential to earn $24 an hour. Or you can keep your $ 24 an hour office job.
It is hardly a protest if you resist remote work, can’t find a remote job, and end up in a labor job requiring you to go on-site each day.
There is always the chance that the job market will loosen up for office-related jobs, and there will be a tick-up in remote work.
However, the issue is that the more workers vocalize their displeasure with the current situation while doing nothing, the clearer the signal that workers will talk about it but not take action. This means that RTO is not only here to stay but will likely continue to spread to more employers.
