There are a lot of great ones in here, but there’s another perspective I think should be added. For a long time, employees have been commoditized. We’re resources. Interchangeable. And that gives companies tremendous power.
WFH puts us on more even footing. There are entire cities supported by a single industry or even company. Now we aren’t limited geographically in who we can work for. If you’re toxic to work for, we can leave. It saps the power of the leadership to say “my way or the highway.”
I don’t think this is the secret underlying reason. I agree it’s real estate values that are mainly driving it, but I think this is absolutely part of it. Toxic leaders (and every company has them) are finding people are less willing to tolerate their bullshit because they aren’t over a barrel to the same degree. Still need universal healthcare to really break their back.
We do need universal healthcare absolutely, take that out of the labor package but WFH I think will only be beneficial in the short term (for employees - I do think it beneficial for the environment) it’s a shorter step from WFH to outsourcing to get the cheapest labor cost. I see this happening even at my company, an event management company so we are all about in person stuff - we lost an accountant and they wouldn’t let us get a replacement, already we have the infrastructure to work from home so they said “no but you can have a consultant who works in India, she can do it cheaper.”
Not that they couldn’t have done this anyway, but in this particular case, they wouldn’t have done. WFH opened that door for this company.
Yeah for quite some time I have been saying labor is priced artificially low. All of the barriers to finding a new job while working. All the risks of even short-term unemployment. Workers are already fucked by the power imbalance but without any liquidity in the labor market it’s so much worse. WFH adds liquidity, they hate it.
There are a lot of great ones in here, but there’s another perspective I think should be added. For a long time, employees have been commoditized. We’re resources. Interchangeable. And that gives companies tremendous power.
WFH puts us on more even footing. There are entire cities supported by a single industry or even company. Now we aren’t limited geographically in who we can work for. If you’re toxic to work for, we can leave. It saps the power of the leadership to say “my way or the highway.”
I don’t think this is the secret underlying reason. I agree it’s real estate values that are mainly driving it, but I think this is absolutely part of it. Toxic leaders (and every company has them) are finding people are less willing to tolerate their bullshit because they aren’t over a barrel to the same degree. Still need universal healthcare to really break their back.
We do need universal healthcare absolutely, take that out of the labor package but WFH I think will only be beneficial in the short term (for employees - I do think it beneficial for the environment) it’s a shorter step from WFH to outsourcing to get the cheapest labor cost. I see this happening even at my company, an event management company so we are all about in person stuff - we lost an accountant and they wouldn’t let us get a replacement, already we have the infrastructure to work from home so they said “no but you can have a consultant who works in India, she can do it cheaper.”
Not that they couldn’t have done this anyway, but in this particular case, they wouldn’t have done. WFH opened that door for this company.
Yeah for quite some time I have been saying labor is priced artificially low. All of the barriers to finding a new job while working. All the risks of even short-term unemployment. Workers are already fucked by the power imbalance but without any liquidity in the labor market it’s so much worse. WFH adds liquidity, they hate it.