Constructive dismissal is a thing.
If google wants to get rid of more employees they can just fire them, but that costs them money, hence this BS.
> Team building works better in person
Can you cite the studies showing that this is (a) true, and (b) that better "team building" results in better output? Every actual study I've seen says that open office plans (what google uses) are objectively terrible for productivity, morale, and employee health, so if you're going make a claim you should be able to point to _some_ study supporting this.
For (b) above, once of the biggest reasons for "team building" is to induce lower employment mobility so you can pay people less.
> I suspect that at a fundamental level most people here know in-person adds an important quality that is missing otherwise.
The whole reason this is a problem is that that is a fundamentally untrue statement. There are clearly people who prefer working in an office, and what we are getting here is that those people go "I can only do my job in an office, therefore everyone else needs to be in the office as well".
I don't know how many times I'm going to need to say this: just because one group of employees isn't able to work without constant supervision, or depends on office life to provide a surrogate social life, or whatever, doesn't mean that isn't true of everyone.