The owners of capital explicitly believe that they can dictate every aspect of your life: where you live, under what conditions you work, your access to food, how you spend your time outside of work.
They want you to have to spend time in social reproduction, unpaid, to meet their standards and account for their failings.
If you are forced to come in: if you live too far, too bad, sleep less, don’t see your family, drive further. Don’t get into an accident though, or be late due to traffic. Ensure you have a vehicle and you are keeping it in a state that will enable you to meet our demands of you being present for us to almost entirely ignore.
Oh we don’t provide lunch. I hope you brought lunch or are willing to pay for delivery or rush to get food in the half hour we allot for you to eat (unpaid). I also hope you spent time before work prepping that food, as well as your breakfast and dinner.
We expect you to be clean and presentable. Oh, you don’t interact with the public, let alone the C Suite? Doesn’t matter. Shower, shave/makeup, have a separate set of clothes just for the purpose of being here 5 days a week.
The chair we gave you uncomfortable, the lights too bright, the cubicle too small, the floor too noisy? Sorry, this is what was cheapest.
You want us to improve our ventilation system to account for the pandemic that got us to do remote work full time in the first place? What are you nuts? We don’t actually care if you live or die just as long as we can extract the maximum value out of you that we can before you go.
All of this for their ego and to ensure that the real estate market in commercial properties, which is over-leveraged and obviously no longer necessary in the current state of the world, doesn’t collapse.
In tech many companies are looking to lay off employees to cut costs. Ending remote work is an easy way to accomplish this and not pay severance. I don’t think we’re near the end of companies demanding RTO at corporate level, but at an individual team level it will be hard to change.
I’m at a small branch of my company and different managers have set different expectations for their teams ranging from the corporate mandated 3 days per week to being full remote unless there’s some clear reason to be in office. Thankfully I’m on one of the second type of teams and upper management rarely visits our site to realize that it’s mostly empty still.
my employer fired a double digit percentage of their workforce and then instituted draconian RTO policies to, in the words of an actual HR leader, “get rid of a few more without paying severance”.
Within 3 weeks almost half as many people as they had fired had quit. Pretty much every single team lost their most critical employees. They started back pedaling that policy at week four, but they don’t realize the only good people left are just being picky about which offer they take from where.
But they still struggle. What’s worse is that some employees are convinced too. Yesterday had a talk with friend from financial sector - she’s convinced that during the pandemic shutdowns their organization performance was significantly lower. I tend to attribute it to their management style - old school corporate, with lots of meetings, and overall age - most employees above 50 according to her.
Not at all the attrition rates from the war look quite good for Ukraine as long as the west keeps support up. The Russians will fair far worse rates considering Ukraine strong offensive of logistics.
This is one of those cases that exemplifies my personal position on the death penalty. The death penalty should only, in my opinion, ever be used for those who have shown themselves to be a continuing danger to society and were in their right mind when the crime occurred.
Since we really don’t have a complete understanding of the origins of some forms of child abuse, I feel these and others whom we cannot “repair” should receive a sentence that sees them permanently locked up. Not just thrown into prison, but to have a requirement put upon them that they participate in studies into the origins of their affliction to better understand it, and hopefully, prevent it in others.
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