> But to get there, office workers must organize, and take the goals and power of the Office into account. It does not want to be flexible, and it cares little for efficiency. If the Office makes concessions, they will be minor, or they will take time; hybrid work is not a revolution.

This is the central point, I think. The office can be changed, but it won't emerge through the gradual processes (invariably, out of a worker's favor) preferred by capitalism. The bastards in charge didn't even want remote work in March 2020; it will take a nasty motherfucker of a fight to get anything from them.

The problem is that five-day-per-week WFH is mostly a dead end. It can work if you have an independent, international reputation (of the kind that no employer, except in academia, wants a worker ever to get... and that, if you have, you will constantly be accused of favoring over your assigned duties) but otherwise, it's going to put you at a ceiling. If you're WFH all the time, there will be no investment in your career; you will not be perceived as a "go-getter" or a "high potential worker. You are just trading time for money, which no one really respects. Of course, 90% of y'all aren't going to get managerial investment in your career even if you do go into the office, but the fact that the creeping mutual disengagement isn't acknowledged is what keeps you in a job.

At the same time, spending 40+ hours per week in an office where managers (sometimes unintentionally, often deliberately) fuck with your fight-or-flight mechanisms is extremely unhealthy. So, five days per week of ass-in-chair is no good either. And for half of the population, the long-term illnesses it causes cancel out the benefits. Will it go away? Maybe. I'm worried, though.

I think WFH always be something you have to negotiate for. It'll always be "a privilege". (Reminder: under capitalism, housing and food are privileges.) You'll have to do what people did before 2020: start out on 5 ass-in-chair days, perform well, scale up (you're implicitly allowed one day/week of WFH per year) and perform better on your WFH days (feel free to down-moderate your performance on in-office days). That strategy will remain open, and the public sector may move to a more forgiving structure... but private-sector managers are always going to want, at least, the "right" to demand 5 ass-in-chair days as, if nothing else, a way to punish perceived low performers.

I hope I'm wrong. On the outside, I'm an athletic and good-looking middle-aged man, but I'm invisibly disabled (PTSD, digestive issues, Ashkenazi risk factors for even more serious diseases related to stress, etc.) and, while I should be able to live a pretty good life if I can avoid pointless [1] stress, ten years more of standard corporate culture would almost certainly kill me. I fucking hate corporate capitalism and would fight in a war to end it. Realistically, though, I don't think the office is going anywhere. RTO-ers will get the promotions and they'll make the new rules, and if the last fifty years are any indicator, the new rules will be engineered to seem like improvements but be subtly worse than the old ones.

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[1] The funny thing about stress is that real stress is a lot less damaging to the body than the low-level dysphoric stress of office life. Being in a life-threatening situation isn't nearly as damaging as spending thousands of hours surrounded by people who have malevolent intentions (i.e., a willingness to deprive you of income, even for the slightest personal benefit) but being able to do nothing about it. It's being trapped that fucks people up.