Try to stay optimistic. There are market forces in favor of remote work:
1) Employers who allow remote work will have lower office costs
2) Employers who allow remote will be able to poach employees from competitors who do not offer remote work
These are both strong incentives for employers to allow remote work. Obviously not all do, but over time employers who allow remote work will outperform their peers due to the two reasons above, which can help encourage other employers to allow it in order to stay competitive.
For (1) , that ship has sailed for any company that actually owns their offices -- and there are a ton of them. Unless they sell the property, which many never will for as long as company is in a good financial state, one desk not utilized is money thrown in the water.
(Interestingly Charles Schwab is a notable counterexample -- they were forcing people back into office, until the company's finance is in a bad shape, and they rushed to halt that and actually closed down many offices.)
How big a trend is that, though? Most companies are all too happy to do a capitalism and move office expenses into OpEx, to improve their return on capital by being a pure-play widget company instead of a hybrid widgets / real estate development and holding corporation.
Sure, there are some big sprawling HQs of the gigacorps who just can’t find enough space to rent otherwise, but that seems to be a minority of office employment to me?
3) Employers who are fully remote (as opposed to even 1 day per month in office) can hire in different locations. For many roles, you can find great employees in places like Eastern Europe for far cheaper than in Silicon Valley, for example.
It could work against you as a US worker. They would set up branches in Europe (and other places) and just hire there, instead of having headcounts in the US.
It depends on where you work and what industry you're in.
A majority of the leads I get from recruiters about dev work are from companies who now have hybrid or full on-site requirements. It's being outlawed like you say, but there is a push from certain companies to be back in the office.
The last three contacts I've gotten from recruiters always ask me if I'm ok being in the office three days a week on job req's they've contacted me about. So take solace in the fact more people are opting out of these kinds of jobs and recruiters are telling me the more companies require in office or hybrid, the smaller the pool of worthy candidates - regardless of whether they're disabled or now.
There is push to get people to go back into the office, but at this point, I'm not seeing a real willingness for people to jump at those jobs right now.
I can confirm that the market has gotten weird in that area. In Chicagoland, the recruiters outright told me that remote is not gonna happen for those roles. I declined based on remote part and the upper range. I am not sure who they are getting at those rates, but I wish them well in their quest to lower costs.
> I'm pretty terrified that the gears of capitalism will eventually lead to remote work being outlawed.
Unlikely. The current "RTO" push is simply executive management not wanting to take the write-down hit on all that unused office space that is a loss now that no one is working inside of it. Once they've either jettisoned the space, or taken the write-down anyway (because they were forced into this) you'll find all these RTO calls dying down.
The vast majority of office space is rented. My conspiracy theory is the executives that are pushing RTO are the demographic that have millions of dollars invested in commercial real estate in general, not because the company owns their own office buildings.
The Market, as in the free exchange of goods and services, should be happy to get more work out of another person.
For Capitalism, as in the system wherein the means of production are privately owned, it might be a toss-up. A person who works from home isn’t going around the world providing as much value to the landlord class.
After years of companies insisting that working without being physically in the office 5 days a week was impossible, it was the government saying "Your offices are closed" that made remote work at all common. I know remote work existed as a small niche before that, but I can't give capitalism credit for normalizing it.
Disabled people have been begging for years to have more flexible working arrangements, and have been constantly told "sorry it's impossible." But then covid shows up only for everyone to discover it's been possible the whole time.
Covid didn't invent remote work. I had been working remote for almost 10 years before Covid arrived. It merely accelerated a force that was already in motion.
> I know remote work existed as a small niche before that
You have to distinguish not physically being in the office from "working from home." A LOT of jobs (e.g. many sales job, on-site consultants, even my oil delivery guy) didn't involve being physically in the office much but weren't WFH.
Government and capitalism are terms that ultimately refer to people. In this case, given the context of caitaliso-democratic America, the very same people.
I actually love capitalism, but I also have a healthy mistrust of those who have mastered it. I can foresee the real estate and commercial implications of mostly remote labor leading to legislation. In the US, we have a huge problem with private equity firms buying up companies, and if they own the IT companies and the restaurant companies, it might behoove them to lobby for RTO legislation to drive more traffic through their brick and mortar businesses.
I don’t see any particular need to assume the ownership structure implies something about remote work. We could easily imagine that in a market socialist system people might be more willing to have WFH policies that benefit their co-workers.
1) Employers who allow remote work will have lower office costs
2) Employers who allow remote will be able to poach employees from competitors who do not offer remote work
These are both strong incentives for employers to allow remote work. Obviously not all do, but over time employers who allow remote work will outperform their peers due to the two reasons above, which can help encourage other employers to allow it in order to stay competitive.