Cunts.
Given what happened on the stock market, looks like this is a step towards bracing for the impact that recession might bring. Not that everyone would line up at the shops in the CBD recession or not as it feels like one anyway. Just a cop out to say that we tried by bringing your potential customers in your vicinity. What fun times to look forward to.
Truth is any economic difficulty has been used as an excuse to force workers in line. That employees weren’t always under management’s thumb was always running higher ups the wrong way.
That things worked fine during the pandemic only showed that the idea could always have worked. It took a fatal pandemic to force them to give it a chance. Only way to keep it is to organise.
It’s interesting how the article is all about struggling retail businesses in the CBD and how this is about that. The closest the announcement comes to being about productivity is: “The more our experience of work is shared, the more united we become. This means being physically present in our organisations”.
The case hasn’t been made that experience of work is improved by being in the office, however.
This is all very fascinating, sitting in WA. We never really had the months of lockdowns you all had, and we never had the normalisation of everyone working from home. A bit of it, yes - but 100% remote work is relatively rare compared to other places on this side of the country.
For the record, the pandemic also devastated loads of businesses over here also. Some previously vibrant places like the cappuccino strip in Fremantle are sad shadows of what they once were. I don’t know that this is going to be a magic bullet to somehow save retail.
“The more our experience of work is shared, the more united we become.”
“Okay, we’re forming a union.”
“Wait, not like that.”
Seriously, I’ve had a union organiser lament that WFH was making it hard to work with a certain part of the company. You can’t just set up a lunch or coffee meeting if everyone is in on different days (it’s not a co-operative role).
Interesting contrast to this article on the same day:
Tech CEOs are backtracking on RTO mandates—now, just 3% want workers in the office full-time
Especially ridiculous that this is complete RTO too.
That’s because in tech, reasonably experienced workers have very high mobility. And a lot of tech companies who tried to mandate RTO have experienced significant brain drain.
Tech’s also always had a higher WFH percentage. I haven’t worked in an office since 2015.
Yep, I was going to point out that a decent amount of tech roles had an expectation of WFH long before 2020.
