>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The state [New Jersey] said it will revoke benefits granted under the multibillion-dollar Enterprise Zone Program to companies whose employees no longer work on site at least half the time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
Perhaps one other benefit to remote work is states will stop with this "race to the bottom", where big, rich companies pit states against each other for bigger handouts. Remember the whole "Amazon HQ2" fiasco from a couple years back where all these states got totally played by Amazon? With increased remote work an "HQ2" makes even less sense.
With WFH, the employees stay at home in their upscale suburb areas that don't need artificial incentives to attract money.
So instead they give a $3m tax credit to a largish company to locate in that area, which brings in X number of employees each day; and those employees will eat lunch nearby, etc. And then stores begin to open around that area because the demand is there. If done right, the government gets way more than $3m worth of redevelopment, and more than $3m in increased incidental tax revenue (sales tax, etc).
If done wrong it's a horrible flop, but they're usually just out tax money they wound't have received anyway. This is why you see it being done so often.
WFH is disrupting this strategy.
But Blackrock et al convinced me that there must be a better way. It's the responsibility of capital holders to employ their capital intelligently, not to hand it off to some faceless corporation and hope it gets invested well.
This means owning shares in companies you understand, and then voting in their annual meetings (this can be done asynchronously).
Capital is power, and deferring all of yours to Larry Fink is a horrible idea, even if you agree with him on most things.
Owners should always, always act like owners.
Everyone should do a minimum amount of due diligence on the companies that they own and that make up their retirement / house purchase / kid's university fund.
If not that, then it's better for most to accumulate capital by paying off their home loan or some other scheme that they understand.
The answer cannot be to hand off all power to a single megacorp that owns a significant chunk of the US economy and whose CEO gets to dictate the entire boardroom agenda for the whole country.
The problem is that most people are too small to have a material impact.
The best the smalls can hope for is to invest in companies that are majority owned and run by owners you agree with.
But I don't see how diffusion is a problem; it's simply decentralization. I think the main problem is disengaged owners who think they can buy-and-forget.
If every owner paid even a modicum of attention (even just skimming the annual report) and every owner voted their opinion, we'd see a much better corporate America after one single year.
It would be nice if there were index funds that promised to vote for socially positive issues on votes. That may be more impactful than social good indices.
Even a small minority of voters who care about an issue and raise a stink about it can swing a big change.
Most shareholders, including rich ones, are happily coasting along on autopilot. If someone with even a single share stands up in an annual meeting and makes a good point, I would pay attention.
The parent comment I replied to originally said that return to office is pushed at regular by a fund (Blackrock) that owns office space as well as shares in companies like say Apple or Google, even if that is a suboptimal choice for Apple and Google.
If there's a bloc of even 5% of ownership arguing against this at an annual meeting, it would be a major improvement in the state of affairs. Corporate America runs the world. We can't just relegate all important decisions to big owners by default - at the very least give them hell!
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/upshot/stocks-pandemic-in...
Would this mean that billionaires would have to manually manage their portfolios themselves? I assume not because they could hire a non-"faceless" firm.
Ultimately, this feels like an objection to BlackRock that would prevent the average person from having a chance but do nothing to stop the problem of large companies and already powerful individuals gaining more power.
If all of middle and upper-middle class America skimmed their annual reports and voted their shares, things would change a lot. Boardrooms right now are full of people that somehow get in and stay in automatically. CEO's tend to dominate proceedings, when really they should dance to the tune set by the board, the composition of which should reflect the shareholders, which for a big corp is probably about half of the USA.
I also don't care to use that power - my only goal is to retire one day by investing in the market as a whole through broad market ETFs. I have no interest in individual companies or how they vote. I, and the majority of other retail investors, are simply interested in financial security. Are we wrong to have that goal? Why do we need to start playing boardroom games that we can't and don't care to win?
I think it's much simpler - remote work can be awesome but needs complete rewiring of corporate culture, especially how we collaborate and communicate. Biggest obstacle to that is the ingrained habits of decision makers, who have worked for decades and find it easier to mandate RTO rather than changing their habits. On the other hand, I see remote being adopted by startups, typically led by young-ish founders who got used to the flexible lifestyle during COVID.
Far more reasonable to me is the idea that management wants a communal atmosphere when working on team projects. You can disagree with this, and say it's unnecessary, but I am not sure why we need to generate conspiracy theories about Blackrock's real estate holdings. Silliness.
And likely with the market right now you can’t exit a lease or sell a building without taking massive losses, cause nobody else wants commercial real estate either.
So what I’m saying is, there’s often quite a lot of internal push at these companies to avoid realizing losses/making the COO look like an idiot/etc. It’s not just “blackrock wants them to”, although I’m sure that exists at the government levels etc. There is also broad corporate level resistance to the idea of realizing losses and taking blame for real-estate investments that are now underwater.
Not that anyone in 2019 could have predicted that the nature of the workplace would fundamentally change 6 months later.
Have they heard of the innovator's dillema?
Bueller? Bueller?