Amazon is wrong – a return-to-work mandate is about control | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is wrong – a return-to-work mandate is about control

seattletimes.com

20 pointsdonutshop8 comments

Here is a hot take …

What if big companies are actually afraid of unions or some other form of organization ?

By forcing everyone back to office, it says … I still have control over you. Don’t you dare step out of line.

How else can a big company show its power of its workers other than layoffs, and physically forcing them to be somewhere ?

Could also be a real estate thing. Investors of companies have huge amounts of money in real estate as well. This can be companies trying to please investors by helping increase their real estate values.

This is exactly what this is about, as are many of the layoffs we're seeing. Labor got too much negotiating power during the pandemic, this is the capitalist class reasserting control.

This is one of those paranoid, wrong, but suggestive and agreeable theories that make people take idealogical sides before seeing the data.

I mean, I started by saying it’s a hot take on the situation. That’s a warning label that it will make people take sides.

Not really sure what data there is available to prove or disprove this point though.

On the prove side, there are examples that companies don’t like unions, and are spending $ to fight unionizations.

Now where exactly WFH and unions fit is not clear.

This whole thing is claiming it's about data, but the only data is about retention. It's not that hard to imagine a scenario where you care more about productivity or work quality or any other factor that would outweigh retention. Or, as many have been suggesting, that it's desirable for them to reduce headcount.

Retention is huge though. The work you get from trained and aclimated employees is huge compared to a new hire.

Sure but if you just want to reduce headcount you don't really care about that since you won't be hiring new people.

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