Rod Hiltonlol cry more
David Mitchel Sotelo@rodhilton Can you explain how remote workers caused this? I don't think I understand what a corporate real estate collapse means or how it affects people. If If you don't wish to try to explain this to someone as ignorant of these terminologies as I am, I understand.
Ernest Thornehill@David_Mitch_Sotelo @rodhilton
They diddn't. Corpos have had a grudge against work-from-home policies for a while.
Before the pandemic, the main argument was that wfh would decrease productivity, because people needed the exchange with colleagues and were too tempted to slack off at home. But then covid hit and productivity diddn't only fail to go down, it actually went up in some spaces.
So now that the pandemic is 'over', people who enjoy wfh are refusing to go back to the office, and want to keep working from home.
Since the pandemic also shifted (or made a shift visible in) the job market, from a market where employers had their pick of employees to the other way round, people can use this newfound power to bargain for wfh policies.
Office Space is usually not rented on a month-by-month basis, but likely 5 or even 10 years in advance. Meaning that office space that stays unused due to wfh policies still has to be paid for.
So from a pure monetairy perspective there is a lot of unused space, that costs corpos money without producing anything and landlords expect to see a drastic drop in demand in a few years, which makes both parties angry.
cont
@David_Mitch_Sotelo @rodhilton
Since large corporations and landlord associations have a lot of political power, they can use corporate friendly media to frame this as something the workers are doing to them out of bad intentions.
This headline frames the workers as cowardly or lazy, but other articles frame them as illoyal, greedy, spiteful etc.
If people with less power were to lose their investments or facing economical hardship, this would likely be framed as 'The free market working as intended', but it doesn't so it isn't.
The effect on the majority of people would be minimal, if the market was left to it's own devices as corpos keep suggesting. Though history shows that - at least in america - entities with a lot of power like big corps or banks will usually get handouts from the government.