With the pandemic waning, many more companies are talking about forcing their workers back into the office. At the same time, inflation in the US is biting at about 7.5% (so far), yet many employers are staunchly unwilling to adjust their compensation or expectations to the new realities of our unnecessarily miserable working lives, even as they find new ways and justifications to give themselves offensively larger cuts of the profits we make possible for them during “these unprecedented times”.
What I want to know is how many of you have done the math on what it costs you to go to the office, in terms of money, vehicle ownership and upkeep, time, and stress, etc.
A friend did the math and figured out it's costing them somewhere around six thousand dollars and close to five hundred hours a year for their job to arbitrarily demand that they drive to the office in their city every day, after nearly two years of remote work with almost no ill effects to productivity or morale, aside from a poorly handled departmental restructuring and elimination of personal offices they did during the pandemic, ironically.
Apart from that, I know there are a lot of people whose jobs are at least implicitly threatened every time there is weather that makes it dangerous to travel, and they have to go to work anyway. (Critical infrastructure and emergency services know this is part of the job, and they appreciate when you stay home because it makes their jobs safer too.) The cost of a wreck, injury, or losing a loved one because they had to cover a shift at a non-critical job when there is ice or floods on the roads, or even tornadoes in the sky, is incalculable, yet some of us are made to feel we must risk our lives to satisfy our employer's need to feel that they command absolute control over us at any time.
Are the people at your work talking about this other pay cut many of us are getting lately? If you've done the math and decided to confront this at your job, how did you deal with that? What was the outcome?