panda-roux talks about the upcoming “return to work”
Now it’s “imperative” that we all return to the office so that our entitled boomer company owner can get off on feeling in control of other peoples’ lives again.
This echos an essay I stumbled across recently:
Ed Zitron, “The upcoming remote work company culture war”
In a Twitter thread linking the piece, Ed wrote:
Some people don’t found companies to make money — they do it so that they can hire and control people, and tell people that they have “people working under them” and a fancy office.
In his 2018 book “Bullshit Jobs”, David Graeber offered a taxonomy of “pointless jobs,” which exist, “just for the sake of keeping us all working”. One of these is the task-master:
Task-masters are the people there to give people work that isn’t necessary, or to supervise people who don’t need supervision.
If if we take these two phenomena together, there are two (non-exclusive) types of boss wanting people to come back to the office:
I don’t know what the coming months will hold. In the US, states are making it harder to collect unemployment and easier for landlords to evict people, which could instigate a wave of unrest. If wide-scale protest occurs, my hope is that workers in tech and other professionalized sectors — who aren’t necessarily dealing with unemployment or eviction, but are critical about their work in light of these return to work orders — will join in solidarity with more vulnerable workers. A movement on these two fronts could be the beginning of something truly transformative.