[reaperman]

> the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.

Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.

Companies have no obligation to keep any USA-based employee working (other countries may have different laws), but some reasonable severance payouts would be much more appropriate than firing “for cause”!

[lazide]

This was always a risk at every company due to re-orgs, buyouts, or the whim of executives.

Are employees right to be angry? Yeah. Do companies have the right to demand it? Yeah.

Severance, etc. is always nice. In some cases it may even be required by contract or law, but that is rare.

It seems like the knives are coming out now, and we’ll see who is left standing.

[bccdee]

Companies have a right to fuck their employees over in all sorts of ways. "It's not literally illegal for them to do this to you" is the absolute weakest defence that can be made for any behaviour.

[lazide]

FYI, I wasn’t defending. I was noting market dynamics and likely counter-forces.

How you decide to position yourself (and plan), and how they decide to position themselves (and plan) is of course up to each participant.

[intended]

This argument is also flawed.

“Market Dynamics” is discussed as if it is a physics problem.

Markets are social creations - they are a human way to effectively allocate resources.

They are also constantly being manipulated and shaped to better achieve certain outcomes over others.

When these outcomes are bent to serve the benefits of the few, or to serve the benefits of a principle that isn’t human wellness, its is a pointless market.

The rules against oligopolies, monopolies, fraud and manipulation are to ensure the social purpose of the market is achieved.

By extension - a market that by nature forces RTO, when WFH is superior to the majority of humans, is a market that needs to be fixed.

A negligible % of firms include commute time as a part of your salary. WFH means that you can save nearly an hour every day, doing any number of things that add economic value to humanity.

[lazide]

What argument am I making exactly?

Your statement seems to be one of 'should' due to social factors largely outside of the various actors control and/or self-interest.

Which in my experience tends to mean 'I wish was', not 'will be', let alone 'is'. Unfortunately. But pressure applied to various regulators, PR campaigns, etc. could change that! I wish whoever wants to spend the time and effort doing so the best of luck. When that happens, the factors will change.

In the end, labor markets only care about the wellbeing of participants as much as they have to - because labor will either actually not participate, or regulators will actually intervene, etc.

If someone is willing (and able) to commute 12 hrs a day to fill a job, and an employer is willing to employ that person at the rate they want, that will often happen barring better deals. Stochastically of course.

One can think of it in relation to energy states (when markets get above a certain size) if one was in the mood.

As always though, just as in said physics or chemistry problems, individual 'atoms' can and will end up in wildly different states from the median.

But that a single atom may be a movement/vibration rate equivalent to 100C doesn't mean the temperature of the solution isn't 25C (for example). Or that it won't average out over time for that atom as it collides/interacts with others.

[bshacklett]

Just a data point: When I was living in LA, it would have been nearly 2 hours a day for a good while. My boss, at the time, commuted nearly four hours a day on the worst days.

[chiefalchemist]

Give it time. The (RTO) companies are on the wrong side of history. Ideally these mandates are something the (employment) market will never forget. It will be interesting to see in the near future how many of the RTO execs at these companies will be whining about their struggles finding talent and/or having to pay a premium to attain and return the level of talent they need.

Of course few, if any of these execs will admit they got it wrong. That the root of the problem was their heavy-handed mandates and how they compromised the brand in the (employment) market.

[lazide]

Eh, people forget. Heard about Blackwater lately? Or was it Xe? Or Academi?

And they always complain about stuff like that, even when they aren’t playing games!

[chiefalchemist]

Yes and no. What needs to be factored in is, does the best / top talent forget? Or are they ones with more focus and memory? Does their marketability allow them to be more selective?

I think you see where this is going :)

[lazide]

Oh I'm well aware. How many downturns have you lived through?

It's rarely so easy when times get lean, but everyone has a different experience for sure!

[chiefalchemist]

Compromising in the short term to meet immediate needs isn't the same as forgetting. Once the tough times have passed, the memory rejuvenates and those who can do (i.e., leave).

[bshacklett]

Companies can do a lot of things that are morally reprehensible without fear of legal consequences. It doesn’t make it OK, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they have “a right” to behave that way.

[lazide]

I think you have a very different definition of a 'right' than the court system?

Folks on both sides are allowed to make decisions others disagree with (within bounds), and suffer or enjoy the consequences appropriately.

[anticensor]

Courts are a last resort venue though. They have to work with that standard.

[lazide]

I’m not sure what you mean here.

While having a moral right to something (or not) is definitely important, when push comes to shove it’s the legal rights that come into play.

Legally recognized rights tend to underpin most definitions of ‘rights’ someone has, since if the legal system doesn’t recognize it, it’s nearly inevitable it will be stomped on at some point with no recourse.

And when that happens regularly, it’s hard to claim it’s a right anymore as practically it isn’t.

[froggit]

Companies are gonna fuck over their employees either way but I totally agree that's not the kind of thing they have a right to. The world isn't dystopian enough yet.

[cdchn]

Who is doing this precisely? I've heard a lot of people bemoan that they moved during the pandemic and now are being required to return to the office but I haven't heard of any instances where previously remote employees-- remote from BEFORE the pandemic-- are being required to move to central office locations.

[reaperman]

Amazon[0], for one. But they're not the only ones -- it does happen occasionally, mostly when a company makes a blanket policy "no more remote work, everyone back to the office!" (which makes less sense for those employees who were never at any point in an office to begin with). The author of the linked article for this HN post wrote:

> I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida. Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim).

In the Re: Amazon article linked at the bottom of my post, the employee says:

> Now I'm being told I need to move to Seattle or switch teams, or I'm out of a job. I moved to this area 13 years ago. I own a house here. My partner has a career here. I've built a home here.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-leaving-over...

[cdchn]

So if we want to presume that the original linked article's author works for Amazon, we got 1: Amazon.

Who else?

[seattle_spring]

Google, Lyft, Facebook

[cdchn]

I haven't seen anything about them requiring pre-pandemic remote employees to relocate post-pandemic, only people who moved after the pandemic WFH movement started. I'm genuinely interested in if they're going after this.

[lwkl]

The person that wrote the blogpost was hired as remote worker and was required to move to an office after the pandemic.

[cdchn]

And they don't say who it is, so this falls short of the "precisely" qualifier.

[joshchaney]

This is exactly what happened to me. I worked from home for Wells Fargo for years prior to the pandemic. This year suddenly my status got changed and I was required to go into the office. First come first serve cubicles and none of my co-workers were even in the same state, let alone office. Years prior to the pandemic when I was in the office I had my own cubicle and could at least expect my chair would be the same and nobody had messed with the monitors on my desk. It's like working from an Internet cafe every day now.

[cdchn]

For the past 10 years or so I've been doing "hybrid WFH" where I negotiate 3 days max in-office (when I'm working somewhere with an office close to where I live) and I always get it agreed upon in my employment contract. My guess (and bias) would be that companies that would pull this switcheroo on employees would be larger orgs with faceless HR machinery and most wherewithal to dominate their employees (ie Amazon)

[kcatskcolbdi]

It is quite literally the subject of the article you are commenting on.

[cdchn]

And they don't say who it is. Thats why I was asking precisely who is doing this. I want to know what kind of orgs would make a decision like this.

[dehrmann]

> Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.

The standard advice is stay in the house at least five years. These people accepted permanent remote roles at companies that have been remote-friendly for only two years. The track record's not there; you can't reasonably assume that policy would continue indefinitely. It might, but it's clearly a risk.

[plagiarist]

Why would anyone find it acceptable for a company to hire a remote employee but later change the contract? That's a massive pay cut. It's weird how companies expect loyalty but cannot even keep their word from what they claimed during hiring.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> Some people who were hired in as permanent remote, now are being demanded to sell their homes and move to cities they’ve never been to before.

No one is forcing you to sell your home. You could rent your home and move temporarily until you find a suitable remote replacement.

Or, you could just quit outright.