Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why
The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
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Right now, and it's been this way for a while, the labor market is favoring the workers, so employers had to keep WFH or lose workers. It's surprising that the person writing this article missed that as also a long term trend.
I suspect that now that the economy is cooling, the demand for labor will also cool, power will go back to the employers, and you'll see less and less full wfh positions.
What indicators are there the economy is cooling? Genuinely asking because I thought we just got a great report about economic growth at 5.2%, which is the fastest quarterly rate in 2 years. I know the interest rates are high, but people are still spending.
Us job growth is down, inflation is down, jobless claims up, consumer spending down...pretty much every indicator over the past few weeks has showed the economy cooling. The 3rd quarter ended in September.
They do mention the favorable workers market as a contributing factor, and they say that it would take a recession to see the trend reverse
My bad, thanks for the correction.
I got to the part
“We are three and a half years in, and we’re totally stuck,” Bloom said of remote work. “It would take something as extreme as the pandemic to unstick it.”
And I think even a mild recession is going to "unstick" a lot of it, as I personally don't believe it is in the benefit of business, for collaborative work (such as software development). I ended up not reading the entire article.
The long term demographic trend is towards labor power, ceteris paribus.
To expand on this, Baby Boomers were the largest generation of people in America. They're all retiring or dying now. There are not enough Gen Z to replace them and the number of Gen Alpha will be even smaller since birth rates fell off a cliff in 2008. Unless the US decides to reverse its anti-immigrant policies, the supply of labor will be going down for the foreseeable future, meaning labor will have much more power.
Can you tell the employers that? They don't seem to be getting the memo from all of the strikes.
They will fight while they still can. But will eventually lose the war.
Which is why you're already seeing a push for AI.
Australia would be reducing in population were it not for immigration, and we're nowhere near as low as Japan
