[yanderekko]

I mean, yes it's bullshit to try to apply RTO policies on remote workers that were hired as remote workers. It's not even a "return" in that scenario, properly understood. And IANAL but I wonder if that could be considered a constructive dismissal that mandates severance rather than a "soft" one.

That said, this article flirts with the often-made argument that RTO is some sort of way of boosting commercial property prices or tax incentives. I've never bought this and would be curious to see the argument steelmanned, since I don't think large corporations are going to easily fall into this sunk cost fallacy style thinking. If remote work boosts productivity and allows them to lower the costs of having offices, companies should embrace this even if they made prior investments in having offices.

[hemloc_io]

I think a better argument could be made for tax incentives.

Large employers, think Amazon in Seattle, often have special agreements with the city for taxes.

Without the employees coming in and supporting local businesses there's a decline in tax revenue and local govt threaten to take them away. (As well as play less ball with the larger employer on other things like permitting etc.)

For these large companies they want political power as well, and maybe want it more than a marginal boost in productivity from remote work.

[yanderekko]

I mean, if that were truly the case we'd see companies hovering around RTO numbers that just barely guaranteed these benefits - so far I haven't seen any stories to this effect, so it seems sorta hand-wavey to me?

[ghaff]

In general, max unemployment in many/most states is pretty trivial compared to engineer salaries in general so, while maybe getting $500/mo for a while isn't trivial, it isn't a world of difference for people making $150K+/year.