Return to office is part of the austerity doctrine. There is a concerted effort to rein in the newfound powers of workers, and bring back more traditional order to the worker / employer relationship.

Plenty of CEOs and their ilk have been on the record talking about the need to rebalance the equation between workers and workplaces, pointing to the collapse in commercial real estate as one of the consequences of this imbalance. Remote work is just one facet of the overall idea that people need to be made hungry again and that the worker/workplace balance needs to move back towards the workplace and the needs of companies.

As Clara Mattei said in an interview with Marketplace recently:

> The idea here is that austerity is all about getting us all to have to depend more on having money in our pocket in order to make a living. Together with the precariousness that an economic downturn brings about has the political effect of silencing demands for better conditions or even demands for more radical social changes towards a society that is based on different principles, and not on the exploitation of wage work.

https://www.marketplace.org/2023/02/08/does-austerity-have-a...

The protests against the squeeze in the food system in the EU and France is particularly enlightening, as central authorities seek to extract the “inflation” from the growers of food rather than the middle-men and retailers where study after study shows its where the majority of “excess profits” have occurred.

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240130-french-agricultu...

There’s a tendency to be focused on bad management and bad managers, but the truth is that there’s a much larger movement here to rein in the power of workers.

If this the theory proves correct, soon we will experience a push in editorial narrative towards national debts, crisis and money issues and the need for America and other countries in the west to live within their means, and how each of us needs to do our part.

We are already experiencing broad labor problems.

You can track, to some degree, the anti-austerity and anti-budget protests happening globally here:

https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/prote...

They do not get much media coverage.

Just bear in mind that things are not quite so simple as “bad managers.”

I will say there are plenty of them and finding people who really get how to manage a remote teams is extremely challenging. Most of the people who talk about managing remote teams don’t actually know how to do it effectively, and I can tell you as someone who’s been managing remote teams for 20 years it was kind of funny to watch everyone become an “expert” because managing large remote teams effectively is a different skill set than managing people in office environments.

So yes, for sure the RTO mandates are definitely correlated with poor firm performance and a desire to blame workers for poor results: the study is right. But I’d also submit that it’s part of a larger trend to try to pin the economic consequences of irresponsible spending on the working classes (please note, if you make your money from a salary or RSUs and a salary you are effectively a member of the working class, not the same as socioeconomic classes).

Any time I post on austerity it gets downvoted, but that’s fine. But I think it’s important to at least be discussing austerity principles and how they are being used in these important social changes, as they are profoundly powerful in understanding what’s happening. Do downvote if you think this has no value, but please leave a comment as to why. This is a place for intelligent discussion, and I hope it won’t become another Reddit-esque echo chamber as it does seem to be headed that direction at times. I deeply value the HN community and what I have learned from other smarter people here.