Most remote work came about as a result of covid. While it's been a boon to those living in large suburban homes far from their companies' offices, it's been devastating to city based offices where employees contributed heavily to cities' service economy which shut down and led to increased crime, drugs , etc. That may not be your business to care about, but that's why I suspect government is letting large companies know it would behoove them to be more forceful in getting back to what was. It isn't in the interest of these large employers to find themselves in the middle of unsafe urban working environments which may push their best employees to find work elsewhere. My feeling is, very few employees will quit their jobs to work from home lifestyle. I do think it's unfortunate because many (as my wife) excel here or there, but I suspect with time productive work will slow.
The technology to enable WFH has been around for over 20 years. Covid forced it to finally happen. I say let people WFH. Who wants to waste all that time commuting and risking going into the cities. You have to consider if its actually worth it. Defunding the Police and allowing rioting has consequences. Let the government and large corporations work togethor to convert the office buildings to homeless shelters.
Well if you leave WFH in place for a significant number of people the CRE in urban areas will collapse. Which means the regional banks are left holding the bag of a massive debt write down and likely capital flight aka bankruptcy. I'm pretty sure that is the real motivation for the federal government, to avoid even more bailouts of financial districts across the US. Here in the SF bay area they used most of the excess Fed money during Covid to shore up their transportation problems and BART & MUNI still need a lot more money to survive. BART is now at 48% of pre-Covid ridership. So its obvious that the tech companies here don't seem interested in RTO, at least not in any large numbers. The bay area has a lot of small tech companies and its better to leave WFH in place and save money on a sublease in Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, SF, etc.
I see your point, however who is going to pay for the CRE bailouts in downtown USA? Are these employees going to pay it? It is not free.
The owners will need to workout a deal with the government, which means building owners and tax payers......Who else is there?
Aren't they letting repeat offenders out due to overcrowding in the jails in the Bay area? Lot's of potential space with these office buildings to build some state of the art, high tech correctional facilities.
Bummer. I was hoping to get a job working from home as an Amazon delivery person or at an Amazon warehouse. With all the advances in AI, I expected to be able to work from home controlling a forklift or a delivery drone.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/18/remote-work-from-home-survey/75266226007/ So people aren't always doing what they're supposed to do when "working from home" -- what a shocking revelation! When I used to work from home, I would never run software to make it look like I was active when doing something else. I would never send emails, check in code/documents, or log into work servers for the sole purpose of appearing to be working. And I would never ever watch TV, videos, porn, do online shopping, web surfing, etc.
When I worked in the system integration industry, I couldn't begin to tell you how many calls I got during the nighttime hours when the AGVs and ASRS systems went down. If I am going back to working onsite then I am shutting my work phone off after hours.
We're not all made equal. Some will thrive working from home, some will be able to juggle work and all the other life chores, some will abuse the privilege and others will milk it. That's humans for you. It reminds me of rental protections meant to prevent landlords from kicking tenants out or raising rents whenever they want. It worked until some figured out the rules and became squatters, no longer paying rent and refusing to leave. It's a never ending cycle of taking advantage of others when possible to maximize benefits and minimize effort.