- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Wasn’t quite sure what community to post this…
A recent EnhancV survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. workers subject to new or stricter return-to-office policies found that 72 percent suspect these mandates are really a voluntary attrition strategy — a strategy by their own employers to make them quit their jobs.
The damage is strategic, not merely emotional. Baylor University’s reporting on office mandates and brain drain found that firms with mandates faced greater turnover among women, senior employees, managers and high-skilled workers, while job vacancy duration increased and hiring rates declined. In other words, the people with the most options are often the first to leave. The employees who remain may not be the most committed — they may simply be the least mobile.
I’ve grown to absolutely despise my employer over this. I work for the federal government as a “manager” in a call center, and over the last couple of years we’ve gone from full‑time WFH to being forced back into the office 80% of the time.
I understand that a lot of employers are doing this to push people out, especially now with budget cuts and mass layoffs happening in the government. But that wasn’t the original reason. They did it because corporations and wealthy business owners complained about losing downtown business in major cities. (They wrote an open letter to the government lol)
The fact that my employer is willing to make employees’ lives worse just to appease the rich is revolting. Fuck them and fuck the rich.
What makes me even angrier is how easily everyone accepted it. We could have pushed back. We could have simply continued doing our jobs from home, they can’t fire everyone. Instead, people just complained but complied.
Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to go along with it. The idea of being used as a pawn to make the rich happy made me furious. So I just didn’t go. And I didn’t enforce the rule with my team either. For a while, this worked. My boss would talk to me, I’d explain that I was at least 60% less productive in the office, I’d promise to start going, show up for a month, then stop again.
Eventually they escalated things and dragged me into a fact‑finding meeting with HR. At that point, I had no choice, they were monitoring my attendance daily. I can’t afford to lose this job; the pay is good and there aren’t many alternatives in my area. But simply giving in wasn’t an option either.
So I started calling virtual doctors until I found one willing to properly fill out a duty‑to‑accommodate form. It cost me $150, but it worked. They approved me for full‑time work‑from‑home for medical reasons.
It sucks that it had to come to this, and it sucks even more that other employees weren’t willing to push back. But my mental health couldn’t handle going to the office just to be less productive and to satisfy the demands of people who already have more than enough.
The fed rto was just insane. (Obligatory “fuck elmo muskrat and his little doggies.”) Employees were being called back to buildings with no furniture, or no heat, or no internet; one person was called back to an “office” in the parking garage, another to a storage unit with a forest service boat in it, another to the front lawn of the building. Insanity.
The fall of an empire is never pretty
Was it always this stupid, though?
No I think we take the cake on stupid
Why the hell would there be any reason to have call-center staff, of all people, be forced to be in the office? That’s just brutally stupid.
This also frustrates me.
There’s no labor organization or solidarity here. Some people are afraid they’ll lose their job and then suffer. That’s a real fear, because this is the bad place
But some people are just spineless
Yeah. “Don’t mourn: organize.”
We need to come together as communities and take care of those that are fired. Then people will be more willing. It always comes down to solidarity and solidarity in a rabidly individualistic society is lacking.
To be fair to your coworkers, they probably had the same reasonings. They just weren’t willing to fake a doctor’s note to get out of it.
Start looking for a job right now. They’re looking for an excuse to fire you for totally not medical reasons.