Some More News - Some More News: The REAL Reasons CEOs Hate Remote Work

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Hi. We've been told that 2025 is the year that remote working will die, despite it often being good for workers and their employers. CEOs hate it though, and they're working to get rid of it. Get the world's news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link. Hosted by Cody Johnston Executive Producer - Katy Stoll Directed by Will Gordh Written by Rachel Van Nes Produced by Jonathan Harris Edited by Gregg Meller Post-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John Conway Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales Graphics by Clint DeNisco Head Writer - David Christopher Bell PATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenews MERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.com SOURCES: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KPfhq5mZQj3Zw4GEHReLU1FOBvjVA9iSvna1NTxX9IM/edit Open a Found account for FREE at https://Found.com/MoreNews. Don’t put this one off — join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with Found. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Piermont Bank, Member FDIC. You’re going to love Hungryroot as much as we do. Take advantage of this exclusive offer: For a limited time get 40% off your first box PLUS get a free item in every box for life. Go to Hungryroot dot com slash smn and use code smn. That’s Hungryroot dot com slash smn, code smn to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. Hungryroot dot com slash smn, code smn. Indoor cats and indoor humans agree - Pretty Litter helps my house smell fresh and clean. Go to https://PrettyLitter.com/morenews to save 20% on your first order and get a free cat toy. Terms and conditions apply. See site for details. Upgrade your wardrobe instantly and save 20% off with the code SMN at https://www.publicrec.com/SMN #publicrecpod

God, I'm tired. Oh, tired bones these bones are. Trump's trumping, is the fire out? Has anyone checked on the fire? I'm not gonna. Cold and flu and COVID are back too. Not that they went away fully. Birds are sick.

Stupid sick birds getting people sick with your bee germs. A whole lot of reasons not to go outside right now. Good time to perhaps work from home, right? So glad that's still a thing, right? Right? This week, Amazon announced it will return to a five-day in-office work week. The new change in policy marks a return

to the pre-pandemic way of working. Google reportedly putting its tech foot down and ordering more people to come back to the office. Apple CEO Tim Cook told Santa Clara County employees they would be returning to work in person three days a week starting in September. Computer giant Dell has become the latest company to tell its employees to come back to the office or else.

Even Zoom, the company this is, now throwing in the towel on fully remote work, company that cashed in on the digital work revolution is now requiring most employees to work in person, in person. Oh, oops. Well, here's some news. 2025 is apparently the year that everyone will be returning to the office. Even Zoom, Zoom, the company that almost single-handedly

made remote work possible in the first place, doesn't like remote work, AKA the thing off of which they based their entire business model. This return to office is especially prevalent in the tech industry, which boasts the highest number of remote workers. I mean, that makes sense.

Their job is computer. So you'd think at least they would keep working from home, right? But if the computer perverts are returning to the office, remote work must be really bad for you. I hear it can even kill you. Eegads! We better get everyone to the office fast. Or, counterpoint, what if we all just died instead? Decisions.

What if we all just died instead? Decisions. Mm. Remote work, awesome or just pretty great? Still weighing my options, but while we think about it, let's look into remote work a skosh. And just to start, it might surprise you to know that we're not gonna go all in on the concept. There are issues with it.

There's actual nuance. But that said, there's also not nuance. Because here's some more news. No one likes going to work. At least not all the time. Even if you like your job and get satisfaction from the work, you don't like work as a broad concept. Jobs are necessary for society to progress.

Like even your anarchist forest compound needs someone to cook food and take out trash and buy all the ketamine. And there's a reason we call them jobs and not funds. Jobs are bad. But what if jobs were less bad? This is a question we pondered during the pandemic. Remember that?

Pandemic, okay. Before COVID, only about 5.7% of people worked from home. Then in 2020, the world went into full lockdown mode because the thing I just mentioned. By the end of that year, 46% of American workers were operating remotely. And while working without pants is extremely liberating, and I've never gone back, never! This didn't come without its challenges. Some workers felt isolated.

Slack pings just didn't hit the same as hearing an actual human voice. Others had trouble focusing with pets and kids running around. Kids are, objectively speaking, terrible. There were also communication breakdowns. Turns out, subtext doesn't translate well over Slack, no matter how many saxophone emojis you use. Also, burnout became a major issue. Despite what many assume,

some people were working more from home than they did in the office, either because of that sweet, sweet workahol, or some turd boss emailing people at 9pm. It's like she knows. It's like she knows when I think about her. If you've ever freelanced, you've probably faced these issues yourself. It's not impossible to overcome, but the culture shock was bound to affect some people.

But despite these setbacks, everyone generally agreed that working from home slapped. Parents got to spend more time with their terrible kids, and with no commute, people gained hours of their lives back. They put that time toward hobbies like reading, masturbating, baking sourdough, and of course, masturbating in the sourdough. Personally, I did a lot of laundry. It was incredible! A survey by FlexJobs found that 93% of workers said that remote work positively affects their mental health, and 90% said it has a positive effect on their physical health.

Remote work also saved workers $5-10k a year that they would have spent on their physical health. Remote work also saved workers 5 to 10K a year that they would have spent on gas and lunch. This might be why, according to a USA Today survey, workers love flexible work so much that 42% of them said they would take a 10% cut in pay to work remotely. They would essentially pay employers for the privilege of working for them.

How often does that happen outside of a cult? Also pants options. Okay, so employees like to work from home, sure. I mean, I love riding my bike drunk, but that doesn't make it a good idea. From a cold managerial standpoint, it's important to ask if remote work is more or less productive.

I mean, I don't care, but the people in charge do. And the answer is a bit murky, but also not at all murky. Here's a survey that polled hiring managers during the pandemic who found that remote work increased productivity. So it's good! But the Institute for Economic Policy Research found that fully remote work is 10% less productive than full in-person work.

So it's bad. Except here's another study that showed remote work led to a 13% increase in productivity. So it's good. So what gives? Well, there's that thing I mentioned, that pesky thing called nuance, where something can be good or bad in specific and different conditions.

And as Stanford economist Nick Bloom explains it, the question of productivity really comes down to how employers approach remote work. Companies that do a better job of training managers to support employees, as well as give those employees opportunities for occasional meetups, saw better results. In the end, productivity is only as good as the management. That's what they are there for after all. They manage, it's in the name. And so if the remote work is failing,

it's perhaps not because of remote work itself, or the workers themselves. In fact, remote work actually makes companies money. One analysis found that quote, revenues at fully flexible firms grew on average by 21% from 2020 to 2022, four times greater than at less flexible firms. So it makes money for a company to allow remote work.

But also, and this is a broader observation, but also who gives a fuck about productivity and revenue? Hear me out. Productivity has outpaced wages for over 40 years and there's no sign of that slowing down. Even on a macro level, the US economy is experiencing its biggest productivity gains since the dot-com boom. Productivity is doing fine.

It's never been better. In fact, perhaps we could use a little less of it. Not everything needs to grow exponentially, you know? Just ask like fish and grass and the sky if they are happy about all the productivity we're spewing into them. But again, if productivity has outpaced wages for over 40 years, maybe the wage part is what we should be focusing on right now.

This is all to say that overall, working from home is a win-win. That's probably why pre-pandemic remote work levels have more than doubled today. Of the people who have the option to work remotely, about a third work from home all the time. So why is it also dying? Like, normally we'd learn that it's affecting the bottom line for these companies, and so naturally they'd get rid of it, even if employees like it.

But there's just no real data saying that. So why get rid of it? Is it the Matrix? Did the Matrix take over? I forgot the question. I can't stop thinking about the Matrix now. That movie rocked. Remember when he throated the mirror? Oh, right. Okay, sorry. So why is it going away? To answer that, here's another question

in the form of a revelation. Why do CEOs seem to think remote work is bad for productivity? Because they do. Despite that not being true, the reason remote work is going away is because CEOs are getting rid of it. To quote a company-wide Slack memo

by Salesforce CEO, Mark Benioff, how do we increase the productivity of our employees at Salesforce? New employees hired during the pandemic in 2021 and 2022 are especially facing much lower productivity. Is this a reflection of our office policy? Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture?

Are our managers not directly addressing productivity with their teams? Are we not investing directly addressing productivity with their teams? Are we not investing enough time into our new employees? Do managers focus enough time and energy on onboarding new employees and achieving productivity? Is coming as a new employee to Salesforce too overwhelming? Asking for a friend. Asking for a friend, God, such passive aggressive nonsense. You're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, not a Reddit poster.

Fuck you, Benioff, ruined Game of Thrones. Probably not the same guy, different first name and all. You know what? Hold on. Second cousins? Terrible family. Look, as we already established, the entire productivity concern isn't grounded in reality. If you do remote work right, there are huge incentives for everyone involved.

Employees save money, employers make more money, employees are happier, employers make more money, employees have more cash to throw back into the economy, employers make more money, so on and so forth. And yet, in a recent survey, 79% of CEOs predicted remote work would be dead in three years. Their evidence?

Them killing it. In the same survey, 86% of CEOs said they would reward in-office employees with plum assignments, raises, and promotions. Boy, it seems like they should be rewarding their employees for like doing good work instead of their arbitrary location. But sure, you're the bosses for now. It kind of makes you wonder if these CEOs actually care

about productivity or something else. They just admitted in this survey that they are going to promote people who have the optics they like over the actually qualified people. I believe the GOP would call this DEI woke shit. And speaking of DEI woke shit, there's an entire genre of news pundits

who have made remote work some kind of nanny state millennial issue where young people are too soft and woke and don't want to work a real job. And you might not get to have this ridiculous notion that you're combining all your moral and value, virtue signaling wishes with your job. It can't, is it the employee, do all jobs have to be these things you can virtue signal back there? There's no one to clean sewers anymore.

How do you feel, how does cleaning sewers align with your values or being productive? Yeah, kids just don't wanna work in sewers these days. Have millennials killed the chud industry? That squawk boxer Joe Joe Kernan, doing the real job of professionally complaining on television. Here he is again, claiming that workers need to have bosses to keep them in line.

You really think saving a little commuting time makes up for people that are, I don't know, there's no way you can be as productive. If you're at home, you need a boss, Kevin. You need a tough task master. Gotta have that work, daddy. Work me harder, they'll all say. It's not weird unless you make it weird.

Meanwhile, Fox News blamed progressive politics for creating a world where people don't want to show up to work and interviewed a self-help author to back up their point. You gotta respect solid journalism. Or here's Jesse Waters saying that remote workers are just hanging around their family all day, not absorbing like life, man.

But if you're just sitting in your living room or your home office and you're just seeing your family all day, maybe your mother-in-law, you're not absorbing life. You're not absorbing the environment, you're not absorbing life. You're not absorbing the environment. You're not absorbing the state or the city that you live in or the economy that you're supposed to be producing for.

When you're commuting, you're talking to the coffee guy, the paper guy, the train conductor, other commuters. You're seeing what it's like coming through Midtown Manhattan, and, Jeanine, it's gotten a lot worse. If I lived all the way out in the suburbs and never came in, I wouldn't know how bad the city is. I mean, you see tent cities here, you see junkies. Incredible clip, so much to say.

The train conductor, do you talk to the train conductor on your commute to work, Jesse? You're thinking of your personal driver, aren't you? You get driven to work and assume that people talk to their train conductors the same way you talk to your personal driver, except you don't actually talk to them either, of course, do you?

Amazing. Amazing how he starts by saying, people don't experience the economy. You know how you can like experience the economy? And then his rant devolves into him completely forgetting what he was talking about. And his brain just resets and starts complaining about tent cities.

Open your mouth, Jesse. Here comes the throw up. Waters is full of the absolute most absurd, untethered from reality ideas around how remote workers operate. Considering he's supposed to be the replacement for the faux populist, elitist pundits Tucker Carlson and Bill O'Reilly, it's actually striking how obviously out of touch he is with regular employees and speaks exclusively like the worst boss you've ever met in your

entire life. If I'm the boss and my workers pull this garbage, this is what I do, I start garnishing wages. And then I start docking vacation days. And then you know what I do? I get my private security guards to go over to her house on a Thursday afternoon at three o'clock to see what she's up to.

Your private security guards. Yeah, you definitely ride the subway to work, Jesse. But sure, send your water's cops to people's homes. That's not fucked up at all. The dopey grin definitely means you're kidding. Kind of amazing how angry and threatening a lot of the pushback against remote work is getting. Last year, some company called Internet Brands

came out with a truly horrific return to office video telling their employees that coming into the office was non-negotiable. And I simply have to show you what that looked like. ["Hit Me Now"] Nothing screams, you'll love working in the office like having people dance over the words, come back now or else, and then ending your video with the words,

don't mess with us. Jesus, guys, at least do thriller or something fun with it. And again, just because you're doing a dopey grin doesn't mean we don't know that you're not kidding. So it's not just that companies and pundits are pushing against remote work, but they are downright angry about it. They're treating it like a political ideology

and waging this weird war against remote work. Because as we all know and love, everything is political now. But perhaps there's more at play here. So after the break, we'll talk more about this weird crusade against this objectively good thing and why perhaps it's actually going on.

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Piermont Bank member FDIC do not put this off folks join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with found. You'll be glad you found them. I'm really good at winking. Ah, that ad monster. Scary, but fair. So before the break, we were talking about how, despite it being better for productivity, the people in power are getting really weird and aggressive about forcing their return

to office policies. It honestly makes me feel good about working a job where I don't have to deal with some jerk forcing me to show up any second, doesn't she? Aha! It's me, your jerk! I know! I know it's you! Look Scruffy, I was listening in and heard you screech on about working from home

and I actually think it is a great idea. You should work from home. What? You do? You think I should work from home? Sure do. You think I should work from your home, don't you? We could get you a little bow tie

and you could bring me my soup. I need my soup, Cody. Where's my soup, Cody? I'm hanging up on you in three. Oh, you wouldn't even need a butler's bell. Two. I could just text you the word ding. One.

So anyway, it seems like managers and bosses sure are getting aggressive about forcing their return to office policies. And the more you hear them talk about it, the more their language gets very...loose. Very vibey. You might remember from the clip earlier that Amazon recently sent out a return to office mandate for all of its employees. In the letter, CEO Andy Jassy claims he's doing this to create a better culture.

You know what's great for culture? Forcing everyone to be somewhere they don't want to be. But also, what does it mean to have a better culture? But also, also, since when did Amazon care about their culture? This is the company forcing workers to piss in bottles. All they care about is the bottom line. Where do you plug in the vague concept of culture

into that equation? And how exactly does it help with culture or productivity to piss on your employees harder than a plastic bottle in a delivery truck? Because they are pissed and pissing, both things. Blind pulled over 2,500 verified Amazon professionals one day after Jassy sent out the RTO memo. Over 90% of Amazon's workers are dissatisfied

with the company's new in-office policy. And a third said they know coworkers who have handed in their resignation because of the announcement. How is that good for productivity? I would argue that it actually has nothing to do with productivity or even revenue, but rather a few larger things at play.

Some are subconscious while others are direct and insidious. For starters, Jassy would go on to say that working in person makes it easier for employees to collaborate, but there's actually no evidence that you need to be physically with someone to collaborate and invent. In fact, if that were true,

you'd think that CEOs wouldn't get less than half of their actual work done at the office. Anyone who works in an office can attest to the fact that you absolutely get less work done there. It's something everyone knows. It's just a thing in our pop culture. Offices suck and no one gets work done. Here's a survey where 80% of people asked said,

they couldn't go an hour without some kind of distraction in their workplace. I can tell you firsthand that when I worked at Cracked, we would avoid going into the office if we had to actually write anything that day. Those lists about Rasputin and Harry Potter don't conjure themselves, you know. But of course, you know who does love being in the office? Middle and upper management, and to extend our pop culture knowledge, that's stereotypically because they need to justify their jobs.

So when these CEOs and bosses use words like culture or say that it's easier, I think they're mainly talking about their jobs and not employees' jobs. It's way easier to justify your existence if you are physically seen at your desk and sitting in meetings. But once everything gets boiled down to emails

and pure output, suddenly, you might not seem so important anymore. Not to mention that these dudes are just lonely. Not all of them, I'm sure, but to extend the stereotypes, it's lonely at the top. For some people, work is all the socializing they have. Not gonna name names, but certain rich CEOs probably don't see a friendly face

unless they are paying them to act nice to them and say they're good at Elden Ring or coups. This is why they'd much rather measure performance based on how much time someone spends in an office doing the big quotes, work. And it's just so much easier to monitor that when you get to spy on your employees every action. Amazon recently informed workers that their arrivals, departures, and time spent in company buildings will be checked by monitoring their swipes of corporate badges. recently informed workers that their arrivals, departures, and time spent in company buildings will be checked by monitoring

their swipes of corporate badges. So when Jassy talks about strengthening company culture, perhaps what he actually means is their culture of surveillance. So those are like the most obvious and weirdly more innocent reasons a company might want their people back in the office. It's weird to call surveillance innocent,

but it's the stuff we already kind of know. But there's a whole other reason they are doing this that is somehow more messed up. Hey Kelly, Twitter now acts, it is the worst deal in the mosque universe purchased for $44 billion in 2022 with the help of those banks. It has struggled to retain advertisers and lost 70% of its value according to OneMark.

Oh, there he is. I said I wasn't gonna name names, but my hand has been forced. Like his hand was forced to do that gesture he didn't wanna do. So epic gamer Elon Musk has gone full-throated against the idea of working from home. He called it morally wrong and said that remote workers

are detached from reality and give off Marie Antoinette vibes. Amazing. Marie Antoinette vibes says literally the richest human alive who told an entire country they need to brace themselves for tough times. Not him of course, he'll be fine, but you brace yourself for tough times. He specifically said that remote workers

think they don't actually need to work hard and was one of the earlier CEOs to demand his employees specifically, but not exclusively at Twitter, to come back to the office. In his email, he pointed to a slowing global economy as the reason Twitter lost their ad revenues, as opposed to, you know, for example,

that time he literally told advertisers to go fuck themselves and said not to advertise on Twitter. But sure, the economy, Elon, seems like he's willing to blame anyone and anything before admitting he screwed up. And that clearly includes remote work. See, it's not that he drove Twitter into the ground by dismantling everything that people liked about it.

It's the darn morally wrong people working from home. And it turns out that it's not just Elon doing this. One research paper argues that CEOs often use their complaints about remote work as a smoke screen for poor stock market performance. And forcing employees to return to the office is a way to reassert their dominance over them. But don't just ask those eggheads. A quarter of bosses have admitted to using return to work as an excuse to make

employees quit, at least in one survey. Honestly, it's pretty crafty. I'm not saying it's right or good, just that it's crafty. It's such a smart evil move that it makes sense to hear that Musk stole it from other CEOs. Because the tech sector is a prime candidate for this sort of thing. After seeing enormous growth during the first two years of the pandemic, the tech industry started to slow down around 2022 to 2023. Profits got smaller, stock prices slumped, and what do you do when your stock is tanking? You downsize, of course. But not with the usual missionary position layoffs.

No, that would look bad and evil. Fingers might get pointed at you, the hypothetical CEO this is suddenly from the point of view of. You gotta reduce the head count without saying you're reducing the head count by forcing voluntary resignations to reassure shareholders that a return to office mandate

is about sparking more productivity. Then you can get a big raise for saving the company money and finally afford that comeback for your singer songwriter career, making Celtic new age rock. It's Enya, the hypothetical CEO is Enya. It is fun to imagine things. Anyway, take Zoom for example. As we mentioned, Zoom made headlines

when they announced their return to office mandate. They said it would put the company in a better position to leverage their technologies and new innovations, but you know, not to actually use its technologies and innovations. So while this seemed comically against what Zoom stands for, it turns out that this was also around the same time their shares dropped from $500 at the peak of the pandemic

to $68 a share. So now they're in this downsizing K-hole where they have to blame remote work for their poor performance, which in turn encourages less remote work and creates less revenue. It's kind of like how Walgreens pretended like shoplifting was this big problem

so they could downsize and then put everything behind glass. And they're now losing money because no one wants to go through the trouble of buying their locked up products. Man, being a CEO must be so fun. You don't have to know anything about anything and can just do drugs all day,

say the R word a bunch and drive your company into a wall. It's like playing GTA online. Grand theft asshole. And of course, other tech giants like Google, Meta and Amazon have followed the same pattern. They enforced some kind of return to office policy around the same time that their share value

started to go to shit amid recession fears and consumer spending changes. So what do they do? They distract shareholders with shiny new office mandates. Meanwhile, employees were quietly pushed out with soft layoffs, where you're not technically fired because you quit when you refuse to return to the office. While Amazon CEO denies that their five day RTO policy

is a back door to reduce head count, it's hard to believe him considering that everyone is doing this and even some have admitted to it, like we said before. It's two birds, one stone, right? It's actually more like three birds because forcing people to voluntarily quit saves them more money

because no severance packages. Wow, do they suck. Not just morally, but in running these companies too. There is this obsession with short-term gains that completely ruin long-term progress. They will blame anyone and anything for a momentary lapse in profit, even if it means shooting themselves in the foot.

Because no doubt this process is booting an ass ton of extremely qualified employees and degrading the overall value of these places. And boy, I sure hate to make it political on this political news show, but a lot of this thinking applies to larger issues in this country, this lack of thinking ahead,

or this contradictory nature where people like Elon Musk will complain about a lack of thinking ahead, or this contradictory nature where people like Elon Musk will complain about a lack of skilled employees, but also have no interest in accommodating workers in a competitive market. Don't you like the free market, Elon? Well, perhaps you'd find more employees if you offered more perks,

or perhaps you just want to abuse the H-1B visa to underpay people and need a scapegoat, because I'm sure people will come to the office if their passports are at risk. But I digress, which could have been the name for this show, actually. There is one more secret reason why companies are against remote work. A lot of them simply have big investments in commercial office spaces, and it's getting hard to justify paying for these giant buildings when no one's actually using them. I know that sounds silly, but it is a motivator. This brings us to a less

insidious but arguably more fascinating reason why there's this push away from remote work, which is that companies are just kind of set in their ways. A lot of older generations simply don't want to do the work required to make this change on top of a lot of economic and societal adjustments that it would create. In fact, after the break, we're gonna talk about those changes and adjustments because moving to remote work,

while probably better for at least a lot of professions, is going to present some challenges. Does that mean we shouldn't do it? Nah, because after this alleged break, we're also going to talk about how to overcome those challenges. Boy, this so-called break sounds really exciting now. I'm so pumped for this break.

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I said comfort weird, so I'm gonna say it again. Where comfort rules. Leave it all in. I overhyped the break and I realized that now. I'm so sorry. So if you recall with your brain, we were talking about the fact that swapping to remote work while both rad and gnarly would get a little gnarly

and create some totally bogus problems as well. Problems we might not see coming. For example, one would assume the most obvious benefit of remote work is that it's better for the environment. Fewer people commuting to work would obviously cut down on emissions. So it makes sense that fully remote workers produce 54% less carbon emissions than people forced to be in an office. But you notice that I said fully, right?

Because according to a report from Carbon Trust and Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications, working partially from home could actually be way worse than either option. It makes sense when you think about it. During the lockdown, residential homes used way more electricity. Your home isn't set up to be an energy-efficient workplace, and we're essentially taking a cubicle and expanding it into an entire home. Instead of powering a single floor of an office, we're powering an entire neighborhood. Which is fine, if we aren't also going to a totally separate building sucking up the

same energy. We've essentially doubled the energy it requires to work and added some car pollution to the mix. I guess if we had walkable cities and reliable public transportation, we could offset some of that, right? Except here's another problem. Why would we do that?

Like we should do that. But according to one study, just a 10% shift toward remote work could reduce transit fare revenue by $3.7 billion nationally. That's a 27% drop in income. Can't stress enough that I'm all for remote work. But something people don't consider is that it would fundamentally change our entire infrastructure.

We have entire parts of our cities devoted to offices and other financial institutions. Anyone who's played SimCity can tell you that. One analysis found that office space leased across 14 major US real estate markets fell by 60% between 2019 and early 2022. And as of 2023 at least, 18% of office buildings in US cities are sitting empty with only 1.4% of that space being repurposed

for housing or other stuff. Should we begrudgingly go back to work to fill those buildings? Absolutely not. But it's something we do need to think about because it's not just offices there, it's businesses that make their money off of people who go to those offices, restaurants, convenience stores, cocaine dealers.

Think about what happened when everyone decided to buy everything off of Amazon and how the mall is dying before our eyes. This would be one more physical space we kill off. Is it a good space? Not really. I'm not sad when a Chick-fil-A closes. But what does bother me is when nothing

opens up in its place. Put a laser tag there! Anything but nothing. I'll take a grimy strip club if you got it. Chick-fil-A's! See? You don't even have to take down the old sign. Again, these are solvable problems if we lived in, like, a better country. They could put affordable housing in there or parks or other walkable areas, but they won't. At least not until the city dies first. The good news is that it might.

Big cities like San Francisco, New York, and LA did take a hit from the exodus of remote workers. This is in part due to the rent, obviously, but enabled by remote work. After all, why would you pay 4,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment when you can pay half that for a fucking house? The only reason these cities were able

to charge criminal amounts for rent is because people needed to live there in order to make it in an industry. Well, guess what, fuckos? San Francisco alone is now seeing huge drops in their tax revenue. They literally made it impossible to live there. Like Zoom and Walgreens,

you dismantled the one function you had. Meanwhile, remote and hybrid workers are thriving. By moving out of expensive cities and into the suburbs, they're living like kings while still being close enough to the city to maintain that sweet, sweet city vibe. These remote workers have the best of both worlds, spacious homes and no commutes, access to cool concerts and great restaurants, and none of the downside. See? It's not all bad,

because while downtown might be dying, the areas outside of the cities are thriving. There are even new Zoom towns like Nashville, Sacramento, and Dallas that are growing thanks to the influx of remote workers looking for more affordable living and willing to settle for a more mid-city experience. And it won't just be remote workers either, because thanks to the slow and apparently unstoppable death of the planet, we're also going to see a lot of climate disaster relocations. Cool. And neat. Specifically, anyone living near the coast is gonna move.

And it turns out that most people tend to still stay in the general area where they lived, and just scooch over a bit inland. So for a coastal city, that means residents will be moving to the same exact areas these remote workers are going. And right now, you're probably thinking that besides the planet dying, none of this sounds all that bad, if you can work remotely and move. Because in all this talk of the lockdown and climate disasters and crumbling cities, we've been purposefully, for thematic reasons, ignoring a huge group of people who are also affected by this. I am currently the number two person in the meat department, and I've been in that capacity for the last 12 years.

We are risking our lives. I have asthma, and I just got over pneumonia in February. But I take that chance to go out here to work because I know we have to survive. Right. Not everyone can work from home. Working from home is a privilege. People with advanced degrees have a better shot of landing a remote job, with 38% of them doing hybrid or remote work as compared to 7% of people with only a high school diploma.

During the lockdown, around a third of Americans were deemed essential workers. This affected everyone, regardless of sex or race, however 70% of them didn't have college degrees. There's nothing wrong with not having a college degree, of course, but it's important to remember that this entire conversation around remote work is a bit of a class issue, and the consequences of it affect everyone. Not just people left in these cities, but the people in the towns these workers are moving to. Housing prices, for example, have gone way up in these areas, putting a strain on the locals. Many of these towns don't have enough housing for everyone.

For example, in Springdale, Utah, the average home price has skyrocketed by at least 60% since the start of the pandemic, reaching more than $575,000, way too expensive for the town's OG residents not making Google dollars. In escaping the problems of the city, remote workers are essentially just moving the city somewhere else. That comes with good aspects, like boosting the tax revenue, but it also makes for some bad aspects. And the thing is, all these problems do have solutions.

Other countries have figured some of this out. Brazil introduced a law that requires employers to use electronic timekeeping to track remote hours. Chile went a step further, making it a legal right to disconnect from work for 12 hours. Meanwhile, Norway banned remote workers from working on Sundays or at night, which is a huge win for everyone but vampires. They always get the short pointy end of the stick. Australia followed suit with right to disconnect legislation,

allowing workers to ignore work calls, texts, and emails outside of working hours without fear of getting fired or receiving passive aggressive comments from their bosses. Germany, Italy, and Belgium hopped on that bandwagon and the European Parliament even introduced a law to protect remote workers across the entire EU. Portugal has taken remote worker protections to the next level by making employers pay for some of their remote employees' electric remote workers across the entire EU. Portugal has taken remote worker protections

to the next level by making employers pay for some of their remote employees' electric and internet bills. In general, countries with strong labor protections are also doing more to take worker burnout seriously. So, as you can imagine, it's not, it's not so great here in the US of A. Some California lawmakers did try to pass similar legislation, Imagine, it's not, it's not so great here in the US of A.

Some California lawmakers did try to pass similar legislation, but the bill stalled in committee, but only because of course it did. American flag emoji. So going back to why these CEOs and the media and the people in power don't want remote work, despite it being better for everyone, it would mean addressing all of these problems.

Not just in the company itself, but the country around the company. It would be new laws and infrastructure. It would mean addressing the fact that not everyone could work from home, and the consequences would economically devastate certain areas. And so to them, it's just easier to try and put the genie back in the bottle. The same way it's easier to lean back on fossil fuels and regress views on stuff like civil rights. It's just easier for people in power to do things the way we've been doing them.

To not try and accommodate a bunch of new things and different people. When you evolve or replace an industry, that means dealing with a lot of displaced workers. It means retraining people, funding education. Perhaps, just perhaps, it means creating a larger system that's designed to take care of people who can't work. Some kind of basic income. That's, stop me if you've heard this before, universal. Because it's not going away. You can't unmake progress, at least not forever. Especially when it creates more convenience. And the question now is whether or not we'll use this moment to restructure things for

the better, or more likely just screw it up. And we've done this before. Screw it up, I mean. Pre-Industrial Revolution, lots of workers were highly skilled craftsmen, where, ironically, no one gave a shit about how long or where they worked. Then we got factories. Things got easier to make. We didn't need artisans like we used to.

So we switched to a system where people were paid for their time instead of the quality of their work. This allowed wealthy business owners to pay their workers pennies to stand in poorly ventilated factories where their primary objective was not to lose any limbs in the machinery. And who helped them do that? Managers.

Managers were a direct product of the Industrial Revolution. People who didn't actually do the work, but rather oversaw all the actual workers. And now, double ironically ironically or just normal ironically, they are one of the groups that remote work puts most at risk, despite triple ironically or double ironically or normal ironically. Like we said at the top, work from home productivity

is higher when there are well-trained managers supporting the staff. But yeah, of course they hate this. Remote work gives power to the employees. So obviously it doesn't matter if it makes companies more money. They don't like it. But unfortunately for them, we're not going back.

Ooh, good slogan. Effective. Winning slogan. We're not going back. We're not going back. Go ahead and use that if you want. That's my gift to you. Nope. I'm not gonna look at it.

We all know what it says. What if it's important? It's not! I'm not reading your text, I'm playing two dots. For work! Thanks for watching, make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel, leave a comment if you feel like it. If you don't, we forgive you this time. We've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to that at the podcast store or watch it on YouTube at the YouTube store.

You can also listen to this show as a podcast if you'd prefer. We've got a patreon.com slash some more news. We've got merch at a merch store. Do you like some of the things we say phrase wise? Do you like some of the characters we've introduced visually and audibly on the show? Well, you can get all that and more on stuff. So go there. You don't have to go away. But the video is over so I don't know what you're gonna do. There are other videos on YouTube you can watch. I don't know what kind. I don't really watch YouTube.