Why they want to End WFH

Someone asked why in another thread, so I thought it would be good to have an answer as a separate post.

The political aspect of economics is important. The total conditions of a worker-consumers life are what makes money for the ruling class, not just their work production. So they want to end WFH, because even if it has neutral or positive effects on productivity, it messes with their interests in several ways.

1. They need to chew up your time and make you deal with and exhausting commute so you're too harried and tired for real political action.

2. They want to put you inside architecture for 8-12 hours a day that makes you feel anonymous and expendable (cubical farm anyone?). The point of the office workplace is to make you feel demoralized and compliant. This is complemented by the weird, cultish behavior promoted by “team-building” exercises and the jargon-filled dehumanizing terminology that's taught to HR and management types to communicate with you.

The environment in places where workers actually need to be there, like factories, warehouses, etc is actually organized around production and you not usually deliberately designed to be manipulative. The language used to communicate with the workforce is usually more objective and less filled with jargon. If it's your physical work that your employer is using to make money, controlling your mind and soul is actually less important. If you ever watch the movie Office Space, when you see Peter's happiness at the end, this is what he's experiencing. Unfortunately, in a few years he's probably going to start feeling the chronic physical pain that happens to a lot of construction workers, so there's that.

Customer service facing jobs are a whole different animal in terms of social manipulation, but going into it isn't necessary for discussion about WFH.

3 .In order to keep you disoriented and keep your self-esteem low, they need to keep you away from anyone who genuinely gives a damn about you. No family, friends, partners, or dogs can be allowed to be around to give you the illusion that you're worth a damn and shouldn't be subjected to unfair treatment.

This is a feature that's unique to this phase of capitalism. In pre-capitalist times, most craft production and agriculture was tied to family units. Even in the early industrial period a factory or mine would usually be deliberately located in the neighborhood or mine near the workforce, so the social connections outside of work would extend into the workplace. However, our ruling class has learned that this makes solidarity, unionization, and successful working class action way to easy.

So now, you have to undergo the unholy and frustrating ritual of a commute where you're disempowered, stripped of your social connections and this must happen each day so you get the point that you're worthless.

1. Getting the middle class, white collar office-caste of to have to spend most of their time in parts of cities away from more blue-collar people is important. If these people spend enough time around each other there might be less distrust and they might realize the have a lot of the same material interests. This point cannot be overemphasized.

2. Real estate patterns change so much with WFH. It's not just that commercial real estate goes down, it's that you don't even have to buy houses in expensive neighborhoods keep your commute reasonable. This means they have even less control over you if they can't keep you scared about making an oppressive rent or mortgage. This is the probably the motive behind ending WFH that your particular employer is most concerned about, as it immediately takes away one of the biggest sticks they have, and without that, they'd actually have to give you so many more carrots for you to deal with their bs. They are willing to spend more money on their real estate so that you have to spend more money on yours. Keeping this power over their workforce is what can justify the cost of their real estate.