And buried in the middle of the article:

“He and his colleagues believe that the company’s move was the result of workers’ decision to unionize.”

  • severien@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This argument never made sense to me. Why would greedy companies voluntarily pay for something they don’t need just to support some “greater good” of keeping the economy afloat? It means reduced profits yet the “contribution” of each individual company is just drop in the bucket.

    • NotGeorge@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      It would make sense if the executives making the order to return to the office also have commercial real estate portfolios.

      • severien@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Then it would be just moving profits from one pocket to another.

        IMHO it can’t explain the industry trend.

    • camelCaseGuy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It doesn’t make sense because it’s some conspiracy theory level bullshit. It would imply that big CEOs or board members either:

      • Possess a big percentage of the current real estate properties (and I mean, huge, like 50%)
      • Big part of their assets are in real estate (again, more than 30%)

      And, that of course, they are all colluding. Meaning, there is a kind of Illuminati kind of society of all the CEOs that get together with pie charts and excels to see how to maximize their profits.

      It’s a delusion that people with a low grasp of reality are using to cope with the fact that:

      • Economy is shit
      • There are people that, because of connection and money, are unscathed by the economic shitinnes we live in
      • Because the economy is shit, companies are grasping to get out of red numbers
      • Because we have had mediocre to sheerly bad managers in almost every industry for most of the last three decades thanks to some economic bonanzas, the only way they see they can improve the margins is by doing stupid things like back to office

      I like Hanlon’s razor for these cases: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I this, I feel, is indeed that.