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It Is Time to End the War on Remote Work
(www.usnews.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This article hedges itself so much.
It's about money and power.
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.
Fuck them. Fuck them all.