They are veiled layoffs

They're giving us bullshit reasons and look how mad people are about it.

The Canadian federal government has been pushing hybrid for about a year now. When it all started they hosted a town hall to answer questions and stuff. One of the directors told a story about how she is happy to go back to the office because she can go to her local Subway and support the business. This erupted into weeks of memes about how we're being forced to the office just to keep Subway in business.

I can't imagine the response to them outright saying they are doing this to please big businesses and landlords.

Corporations get tax breaks from cities based on expected work population and its resulting economic impact on the local economy. Without people in the office, these tax breaks become legally in jeopardy as the city could argue the company hasn't lived up to its agreement.

And a lot of execs have money in corporate real estate, which, as you can imagine, has lost some value in the last few years.

It's always about money.

Tell us the real reason for the push to be in the office or get the fuck out of my face.

A lot of middle managers than need to show that they are usefull and not a bottleneck or useless positions

The real reasons are not benefiting the employee, thats why they dont tell them. These are:

• Use of gasoline for transportation
• Use of infrastructure

You can guess where the RTO orders are coming from.

One of the real reasons is that companies put a shitton of money into physical infrastructure and based their entire selling point for jobs on office perks. Amd now they dont know what to do with that stuff sitting empty.

I'm my limited experience, I've noticed a difference between companies that have invested in real estate and those that haven't. Companies who own their buildings are very strict about pushing for their expensive buildings to not sit empty. Companies who lease office space, and especially of they have flexible terms, seem to be more chill about it. Just a general observation.

What we're seeing is large corporations who have contractual obligations surrounding their office spaces, land leases and the buildings they own worried that if everyone goes remote the market for such property dissappears and so does their investment so they are forcing people back into the office to artificially bolster the market for office space while they work to get their money out of the industry and find any bag holders they can to offset future losses, all at the expense of the wellbeing of the working class.

RTO is all about voluntary attrition to avoid having to pay severance. This shithead exec literally says the quiet part out loud in the article:

“The team will be smaller than where we were before and where we want to be,” Arison said. “So that’ll obviously impact margin in a positive way in the near term. But I also think that shows that you can have a lot of leverage in this business because you don’t need that big of a team to do the things that we need to do.”

Half their staff or half of their staffs? 🍆🥒