If work can be done remotely then why pay someone higher wages here ? One of the dumbest movements in recent history to start demanding full remote work.
The blame seems misplaced to me. Corporate obsession with control might have allowed hybrid work to last a tiny bit longer, but sooner or later they'd realize that there is no benefit whatsoever to having workers in an office when they can do the same thing remotely. At most they might've bought themselves a year or two.
It depends entirely on whether remote work actually = not having to pay for real estate (or only having to pay for, say, half as much). If you can get to the point where you don't even have a physical office and you just fly the team into a hotel ballroom for company meetings every 3-6 months, then you're clearly winning. If there is an inherently physical component to the business and you have office space adjacent to it, you are probably losing.
There's also a significant pro-family aspect to remote work. It's kind of surprising to me that doesn't factor more in who supports/opposes it.
I don't think you can divide it that easily. There's a pro-family aspect for example to homeschooling, that doesn't mean everyone anti-homeschooling are anti-family.
I see if "remote near everything" is the future it's going to do what globalization did to U.S. manufacturing slowly and gradually. Why if I could have nothing but remote workers would I ever hire anyone living in New York City or Chicago or San Francisco or any major city when you could hire someone with the same qualifications that lives in Randomville, could get paid half the rate, and have a higher standard of living once you account for local living costs? Heck, why not have a bunch of Mexican office workers living in Mexico? You can pay them 10-20% and that's still a good job there. How do labor laws work in a 100% remote company? If a person living in Manitoba sues her supervisor living in Connecticut for online sexual harassment for a company that used to be based in Illinois, no longer is post-going fully remote, but the corporate place of organization is Delaware, what state or province's judicial system carries the day? I imagine some version of that has happened somewhere before so there's a little precedent, but quick and easy it likely was not with every lawyer pushing jurisdictional battles.
The big shift will be state income taxes. New Hampshire and Massachusetts already went to court over remote work. With Boston becoming the new biotech center, expect a large number of companies to begin "relocating" to Concord/Manchester. New Hampshire is the only state with no income tax within 800 miles.
