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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

Does this help set precedent that RTO can't be arbitrarily used to cut staff? Would be nice if there was like a policy if you started with WFH you can't just be arbitrarily forced into an office and the company would have to do proper layoff procedure. And if you started in office and shifted to WFH, companies would need to classify whether that was a temporary or permanent change.

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there's not much that will generalize here. the NLRB has a lot of procedural powers around union campaigns and elections. there are a lot of things that, if a company does them in response to a union campaign, are considered to violate the employees' rights -- not their rights to good working conditions, just their right to decide whether or not to form a union in a fair environment.

usually this is doing things like making hours worse, enforcing rules more strictly, etc. in response to a union campaign. but they can also get in trouble for positive things like relaxing rules, giving raises, etc. and in a few funny cases they can even get in trouble for supporting the union.

in other words, if Grindr had, in response to unionization efforts, decided to placate employees by expanding WFH, they could have gotten in trouble in the exact same way.

In most "at-will" states I don't think that would work. A big part of being an employee is that the employer determines the times, places, and methods for completing the work you are assigned. If they say "we want you to work in the office now" your options are basically to do that, or quit.

No? It's a problem because there's no precedent for RTO. But, things like changing an employee's work location, hours among other things is constructive dismissal. And, if it can be shown to disproportionately affect a certain group (eg, "developers", or "developers for product x". The more disproportionate and more specific the stronger the case). Or, if execs get caught/are dumb enough to say that it's intended to reduct head count. Then it may be an illegal layoff. (Afaik that one's mostly california)

California might well be different; I don't know, and don't live there. Where I live, any employee can be fired for any reason, or no reason (protected class stuff excepted of course).

There's precident for "we're transferring you to the Chicago office, Bob" and Bob would just pack up the family from wherever they were living and move. This was common in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s at least for white collar jobs.

> Where I live, any employee can be fired for any reason, or no reason (protected class stuff excepted of course)

Also protected activities.

> This was common in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s

It's a consistently downward trend: https://www.freddiemac.com/sites/g/files/ynjofi111/files/sty...

My completely uninformed assumption is that this (inverse) graph has something to do with it, since anybody who finds a “good thing” in any region would be increasingly unlikely to want to give it up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSTHPI

Disproportionality matters if the policies had a disparate impact on a protected class.

in this context? I'm pretty sure not. I'm not talking Discrimination.

Trying to mask a layoff by taking actions that mostly affect the group they're trying to layoff... is an illegal layoff. See: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/cal-warnact.html

And, california has shown repeatedly that they're perfectly willing to enforce cal-WARN on companies that barely have a CA presence... never-mind ones that have their HQ there. Yes, this includes layoffs that don't touch a CA resident.

> It's a problem because there's no precedent for RTO. But, things like changing an employee's work location, hours among other things is constructive dismissal.

RTO, after years of hiring remote only positions, IS changing an employee's work location. Grindr employees worked from home 5 days a week, across the US. Then the RTO would make engineers move to Chicago and go into an office 2 times a week. In what world is this RTO not changing employee's work location?

In the world where they only hired people who told them they live and work in Chicago. Not saying that's what happened here, but it'd really not be their fault if people took advantage of a situation and moved away or lied during an interview/on the contract. Are you sure they don't have Chicago as the contractual place of work? In Europe that's standard if you work remotely - exactly because of this.

I generally think this "playing dumb" argument companies sometimes employ doesn't fly (or, at least, shouldn't).

You don't have to be a genius to figure out that hiring fully remote means you will get workers all over the US. The executives knew that, were counting on that, and have benefited a lot from that. I don't think you should be able to get away with an "erm, akshually" level technicality.

The executives knew, and the employees knew. I think there's little doubt of that. Then the executives changed their mind. That happens, and as an employee you either accept it or you move on. Or try to negotiate an exception. But you don't really have any kind of legal claim for damages.

We will see if they have a legal claim for damages. Contrary to popular American beliefs, companies don't have free range to do whatever they want. You can't orchestrate a lay-off and weasel around it. If that is in fact what happened, they could face punitive action - certainly other companies have in the past.

Not necessarily. The RTO move came immediately after the staff went public with a union drive; the complaint is less a generalized issue about RTO as a form of soft layoffs, and more that this specific soft layoff was a form of retaliation.

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