Ironically, quit if you don’t like it only works at scale if there is collective action. And collective action is hard if you’re doing it on your own, separately from everyone else.
The market is Moloch : https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
If you could get your first born's weight in $precious_thing , you'd have a line of people doing just that. Sell a piece of your humanity and autonomy? Cool!
Hell, "the market" people would reinstitute slavery if they could.... Oh, wait, they did. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/economics/indentured-servit...
"The market" is whatever the fuck you can get away with to get even more money for you. Most are ethical-ish, but if you look too hard, you might see the 10 year olds in the butcher plant, or the 8 year olds assembling your Apple shit.
I think that summarizes what I think of anyone who leans on "the market".
Its also worth pointing out that 'the market' memes that people lean on have other requirements; the most crucial is buyers and sellers having equal power, which the labor market immediately discards, by dint of the relative urgency and immediate outcomes of failing to make a deal on the market.
A person selling labor has to balance their price against the urgency to secure food, shelter, and access to medical care.
A company buying labor can frequently afford to wait months or even years and it may not even make sense for them to hire some one at market rate - the more you pay someone the more others expect to be paid and the more they expect to see their own salary grow.
It's something to reflect on when people think companies are behaving stupidly for having interview processes that leave unfilled positions for months - the buyers on the market have fewer and different pressures than the sellers, maybe what they are doing isn't stupid just inhuman.
It absolutely does.
And having actually read Adam Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations", most types here usually stop at chapter 2.
There's so many caveats that Smith wrote about with Capitalism, and they're mostly just ignored, or swept like an externality under the rug for someone else to clean up. But again, that's the point of not reading/ignoring past chapter 2.
It's also why I read all of it, to understand why I disapprove of it, and other systems that may be better. But, no system yet can handle that digital and intellectual things cost a lot once, but free for ever after creation.
Say you have company X that makes SaaS. They mandate RTO for all workers. If there are really as many people wanting remote work as you say, then a remote work competitor Y will spring up and talent will start bleeding from X to Y. That happens a lot not just with remote work but all sorts of disruptions that company X types don't like to adapt to.
Speaking with your feet assumes you have the luxury to do so and the other side is willing to listen.
And that lower pay is still double what you can make in other countries.
Is this the hill we want to die on? Don’t we have a lot to lose?
Okay but with remote work, what's the unregulated common resource being depleted or ruined?
The power of workers to dictate their working conditions. Currently, this common resource is being overused by elites who are able to command remote work for themselves but not for regular level workers.
This is a tragedy, and it is a tragedy about a common good that briefly existed as a common good, but it's not technically a "tragedy of the commons" in the original sense.
I understand people conflating the terms in this example.
The factories/companies in the industrialized society copied this format and culture exactly as it was in late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this format, the benefits of the commons (in this case the capability of remote work that technology enables) is removed from the serfs artificially by forcing them to return to work just like how the unwilling serfdom was forced to go work in the factories by shutting the commons off to them by passing enclosure acts.
Some companies will enforce RTO. Some will not. The market will decide how valuable that is, and remote-capable companies should benefit for it.
Some companies are remote by default! You can get a different job!
but this isn't the case, it's management making BS decisions no one really likes. the market is in favor of capital & management in the current market climate so collective action is the only way to push back imo
> If most of my colleagues and the owners of the company I work for decide they prefer to work in an office
If most of your colleagues prefer the office, I assume your union wouldn't push for mandatory WFH.
As for the owners—well, reducing the effect of their preferences on the experience of workers is the point of a union.
How many stories have we seen now where employers have reneged on their fully remote forever policies?