In first world coutries a majority (50%+) of work produces no value(or negative value). It is not cleear exactly why. Graber said one posibility is that in a spoil economy the one taling the spoils does not have to worry about eficient distribution and thos creates a lot of unecesary positoons to increase his/her prestige or further nepotistic pruposes. I may be misrepresenting the vew a bit it has been a while since i read bullshit jobs. I also think the ritualistic aspect of work or school is very important to mantin the myths and superstructure of our current society. Either way working from home shows that most work is umecessary.

EDIT: You specifically asked for the economic motive, real estate real estate real estate. Big office buildings charge rent and if you have people working from home, those buildings become money sinks that can’t be justified. So for managers personally there isn’t economic incentive, but for “the economy” to run on a whole there needs to be inflated real estate or else FIRE investments will crumble.

The purpose of most office jobs in a social sense is not provide any social good. The purpose is to keep the workers occupied with endless busywork so they don’t organize politically or god forbid do something creative and fulfilling that isn’t monetized. Keeping workers in a windlowless cubicle with a horrible commute eats up their free time so they have to spend money to get fast entertainment.

But it’s also just a window into the PMC mindset of wanting to control people. That’s what they want and enjoy, is bossing people around arbitrarily. How many stories have we heard of managers getting mad because somebody did something without their approval or a different way? Working from home means they can’t physically moniter them, they feel worthless without bossing people around constantly. If managers have to work from home (or have majority of staff WFH) then they have to grapple with the reality they are useless leeches.

WFH is a direct threat to management’s jobs and they know it because when they work from home they can’t do 90% of their job, which is harassing and monitoring workers whenever they want. They are frustrated by this situation, being unable to do their “job”, and also know that they’re providing very little “value” because of it. So… they invent rationalizations for why everyone needs to work in an unventilated box and get watched/harassed.

These rationalizations are all based on the alleged “value” they bring to the work, like “increasing productivity” (they don’t actually), “keeping people honest” (lol), “knowing who’s slacking off (and might need to be fired)”, “keeping the team on-task”, etc.

Managerial type ppl don’t just need control, they also need the feeling of control. I don’t think they think of themselves in a bullshit jobs scenario, I think the feelings of responsibility and sunk cost (?) to upper mgmt keep them stressed enough. like at my old job (I got fired) I would just hide from my boss and only communicate with them like once a week or so and it stressed them the fuck out cause how are you gonna pressure me to do unpaid overtime or even my normal hours online? I can just turn off my computer, like literally.

Also unrelatedly I think there’s a school / childcare expensive / parenting from home - type thing which wasn’t a thing for managerial class ppl until the pandemic forced it to be. Kinda not a thing anymore though so idk.

i think a lot of the push is from people who own office buildings and restaurants and things that generally serve having thousands of people in the same location during the day… Big companies that aren’t directly invested in those areas don’t give a shit usually and are letting WFH continue.

Of the big companies that shouldn’t really give much of a shit Apple is probably in a relatively unique position of having spent an absolute fuckload of money on a gigantic brand new office only for it to be immediately closed by covid.

With Regards To :melon-musk: I was going to speculate that he’s just an insane control freak but then I saw this: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/03/feeling-super-bad-about-economy-musk-wants-to-cut-10percent-of-tesla-jobs.html - actually it turns out this is a pretext for a big layoff!