Many employers are increasingly upset that workers don’t want to return to offices or to endure long unpaid commutes from their homes. They keep talking about the possibilities for collaborating in person, ignoring the realities of open floorplans, in which stressed-out workers avoid one another under their headphones.
The Joys of In-Person Worker Collaboration
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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The cold equations. Some of the office bosses want their employees coming to work. In all instances where this can be avoided, those in-office places will find it much harder to compete — for better employees, at price points, and so forth. If you’re paying $X a month in rent for a cubicle farm, and the competition isn’t, the competition is going to underbid you. You will, eventually, have to shrink the office to nothing. There’s a minimum expenditure to keep a building open. Doorman, heat, water, sewer, electricity, etc. Just like with plastic bottles, there’s only so many “downstream” ways to repurpose a commercial/office space. And the cascade effect. All those cafes and chains that sell you a sandwich for $9? They will be gone soon enough too. Whichever one hangs on the longest might eke out a survival income, but I don’t see how, even with the sheep-populace that is the American worker, it can ever go back to what it was.