Employees are spending the equivalent of a month's grocery bill on the return to the office–and growing more resentful than ever, new survey finds

We had a skip-level with a director today who told us our 3 day in office is going to become a 5 day. When asked why, he couldn't articulate a single good reason. It was a "management decision" made by a bunch of tone-deaf fucks who never go to the office or get paid so much money that the cost is trivial. It's time to start unionizing everywhere. Fuck these class traitors.

Time to brush up that resume, WFH or hybrid is the new norm.
- Fully remote is the only way. In my experience hybrid workplaces are just as toxic. It could turn into full time office out of the blue like mentioned here or generally the ones showing up to the office get a bit of a preferential treatment if the boss also regularly shows up at the office.
I wish there was a union for office workers who were forced back into the office
- I'd join in a heartbeat
- We need to start founding them on our own, it isn't just going to happen. These fucking CEOs and investors need to be put in their place. They're deliberately flexing on us, deliberately increasing our stress levels and impacting our lives and health. These fucking leeches would be nothing without us doing the real work for them.
People should unionise anyway. Even if ots a good place to work
RGE

When I was going to the office, parking downtown was $21 a day.

So $105 a week just to park to go to work.

Now, I COULD have taken a bus/train for $5.60 a day... But that would mean adding an extra hour to my commute in the morning and an extra hour and a half at night.

$21 - $5.60 = Saving $15.40 a day, but losing 2.5 hours.

My time is worth more than $6.16 an hour.

WFH I save ALL $21, plus gas money, plus not eating out for lunch or dinner.

After doing that for 3 years, I had $30,000 in the bank and bought a house.

Same here brother. I went from almost a decade of 1.5 hour or more commutes to feeling healthier and happier than I had ever been. It was sad when we were kicked out of our apartment at the end of 2021, but we moved in with my parents temporarily and ended up buying a house in the spring using all the money we saved as a down payment. Thinking back, we saved far more than we had ever anticipated without even trying. We saved on gas, train fare, car maintenance, a dog walker, coffee or eating lunch at work. And then we also saved on just not going anywhere due to the pandemic like not vacationing or going out with friends. Even with all that, we definitely spent more money at the time on delivery orders, alcohol, and investing in home entertainment. But we still saved a shit ton and I wish every day that we could all just work from home if possible. Even aside from all the savings, think of how much less wasteful people were and how much less pollution we put into the air. Think of the extra sleep and the time spent with family instead of commuting. Having kids seemed so much more possible for the future working from home. But naw you gotta have that in-person interaction there isn't any other way except over the last 2-3 years but just forget that ever happened.
Demand better of your trasit system. they can do it but if people don't demand it they won't. Don't forget the proplem is often those elected not the tranit agency
There are other benefits aside from money that you enjoy when riding a train/bus compared to driving.

Buses/trains have drivers themselves, so you don't have to engage with traffic to and from work - and during rush hour when the most people are on the road during the day.

Then, when you ride a bus/train, you lower the impacts and demands on the natural world, like reducing GHG potential per capital, reducing the vehicle waste from oil leaks, tire dust, smog, etc. per capita, and reducing the fuel demand per capita needed to get you where you need to go.

Downside with public transit is that people don't like to be around other people in that kind of setting (for reasons like increased social contact for illness transmission, people might smell bad, might be loud, might pose a threat to others, etc.).

This being said, remote work is a wonderful alternative to even public transit. Agree with you there for jobs that don't need to commute. Some jobs still do, and public transit would be my next best choice. Still, some jobs need to travel more than a fixed route, so hybrids or EVs would be better than ICE cars for that. Etc etc

The cost of it doesn't bother me as much as the time involved. If I'm showing up and leaving at the assigned hour I'm burning 30 or 40 minutes in the car each way. Adding another 15 to 30 minutes to get ready to go in versus my just getting dressed and walking into my home office.

Driving's always subliminally stressful. The whole time you're driving your subconsciously watching the cars around you and looking for problems. Your heart rate goes up and whenever you get to your location It takes a little while to get back in your groove. There's a nonzero transition period there. The last thing I want to do after driving home for 40 minutes and heavy traffic is to barrel right into chores but there I am.

what's even worse is the facr that if they ruled transport was clock in time everywhere would magically be embracing work from home.
My last 3 jobs have had a 45-1.25 hour commute. The city is too expensive to live in, plus traffic, plus trying to find a midpoint between my job and my wife's all kind of lead to this. I get some of my coworkers prefer to go in because they can't work from home because the environment there isn't conducive to working, but that doesn't mean I should have to pay for that. I never realized how much of my time was being sucked up commuting until I the pandemic lol.
my just getting dressed

You got dressed when you worked from home?
- never work naked. even partially. eventually something will happen where an emergency meeting happens or you need to get up real quick. nope not worth it. i don't get fancy, but not pajamas 100%

Office jobs are BS in the internet era. You go to work to look at a screen. You come home to look at a screen. You go to bed, you look at a screen.

Your bosses are taking calls from their hot tubs while smoking big spliffs and making fun of you for not being as smart as them. They figured it out and they'll be retiring any day now. I'm not even being facetious, I know these people. They're the Pakleds of the human race.

I don't know what a "Pakled" is, but yes.
- Pakleds are an alien race from star trek. They're known for tricking smarter people into helping them only so they can take advantage of them, ensnare them, and then dominate them. They also on average have low IQ (in universe).
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritan_Snare

Yes, please ask me to effectively take a pay cut to pay to drive across town so I can sit at a non-customizable hot desk to join virtual meetings with resources all over the globe. But it’s ok because in return I get to be interrupted constantly by people physically bothering me with a question in the name of “collaboration” instead of opening a ticket or sending an email like a normal person. Genius. I can’t understand why everyone’s complaining. (/s in case it wasn’t obvious).

Also I have to pay for parking and lunch
- Is this really the norm in the USA? In the Netherlands most office lots have free designated parking and virtually everyome brings their own lunch.

I work for a FANG company and 2 years ago I willingly took a 13% pay cut on the condition I could work from home permanently. The pay cut hurt but my productivity and output jumped so high that received a promotion along with bump in pay a year later. Being a tech company, they track a lot of metrics around productivity and I know I am 28% more productive when working from home. I refuse to return to an office just because of office politics and drama that distracts me from doing my job. I’m not there to socialize.

Forget socializing... it's all "hey, can you join a meeting?" that has absolutely fuck all to do with you. Slack invites? Ignore. Outlook calendar items? Delete. Much harder to dodge in person.
- I feel like it's worse virtually.
  
  Saying "Sorry, can't walk and chat with you, have to catch up on shit" in person vs
  
  Hearing "saw you were free at 430pm, so I threw a zoom on there. Oh? Well you should block out you're picking up your kid" remote
I genuinely have no sympathy for anyone who works for these parasites.
- They weren'tasking for sympathy
- I am not asking for your sympathy either. You are however VERY misguided. I totally understand the perspective of “big bad company” but without people like me fighting behind the scenes, I guarantee you things would be a million times worse for everyone on planet earth. I have been targeted in the past due to my stance on privacy but I refused to cave to the pressure. Even after high level managers demanded my “obedience” I resisted and won. You can call them parasites but if all they good people leave (and we do exist) then you might as well just give up now and welcome 1984 with open arms.
- A bit weird for those with no choice.

Does anyone have knowledge and or experience with forming a union in the US? After doing some mild research I failed to find a union that represents telework / work from home employees, specifically those who are facing return to office mandates from their corporate overlords

Start here https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-right-to-form-a-union

https://www.worker.gov/form-a-union/

Can confirm. I have to be in the office way more now and everyone hates it. I work way less than I used to to recoup the misery of commuting.

Most people only have around 4 hours of highly productive work in them a day. The rest is just filler on an 8+ hour day when nothing much is accomplished. Or even worse, it's when errors are made that take away from productivity as they fix them.

Commuting sucks out of the highly productive time. So if someone commutes for 2 hours a day, that's 50% less productivity to the company.

For the managerial types out there. The old adage is completely wrong. Time is not money, productivity is money.

The most challenging aspect of returning to the office is the commute. This isn’t surprising because commutes of only 30 minutes are linked to higher stress and anger, while 45 minutes or more is linked to poorer overall well-being, daily mood, and health.

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That explains a lot actually, damn. Is that cumulative, or just one way?

Love WFH for taking care of animals, stress free guilt free breaks, all my home comforts, but I do feel extra sedative when working for hours and do get a bit lonely wishing I could make more coworker friends, but they're on the other side of the continent

Me too. I miss my chill office culture where everyone showed up, but the norm was roll in anytime before 1030 or 11am and leave early if you need to. And expected to work from home a day or maybe 2 a week if needed. As long as you showed up for the important meetings in person and attended had a known presence in the office while you were there, it was all good. And being in the office felt good because it was a good collaborative environment. Now I can opt in to go to the office, and have all the sedative isolation of home without the comforts.

Of course Fortune can't close an article about how stupid RTO is without turning around and advising the (probably employee rather than employer) reader of all the good things they can do back in the office.

So what can you do if your employer mandates your return-to-office? First, focus on maximizing the benefits of this life change...

Cities are expensive if your time is free. All the bullshit really adds up.

I mean, I account for $10k salary increase for in office work compared to what I'd take 100% remote.

However, our research found that returning to an office often is a major disruption to one’s routine, foundational work, and overall life experience.

Damn work. Disrupting their routine and life experience.

What? It's a return to the office, not work. It's not the 8 hours; it's the additional hour (if you're lucky) getting there and back which, for some jobs, brings no discernable benefit.
- Well, the office is obviously the place where the work takes place. It was probably relatively okay for you when you started the job, then the pandemic hit and now you think it should be different. But it's not up to you to decide whether it makes sense to go to the office, that's for your employer to decide - you know, the guys who pay your salary.
Yes. Get used to it corpo shill, or we'll unionize.
- My heartfelt condolences to all those affected. Having to drive to work is certainly very cruel and completely unexpected. Life is one of the hardest.
What you would say with irony, I say with conviction.
- You are free not to work and live the life you're dreaming of.

Are people forgetting that the salaries were high in high cost of living areas to account for this cost. In the new normal, should employees expect pay cuts, or should employees that opt in to in office expect higher pay or stipends?

Also, curious about tax advantaged commuter benefits. Sure sticker cost is a months groceries, but if you are commuting and able to pay that pre tax for Metro or rail passes, it's only 66 percent of the sticker cost.

Also I think the pet and childcare costs are interesting. For child care, is that assuming like 1 or 2 extra hours of childcare per day?

Many large companies that support wfh, set pay scales based on where you live, not where they are. If you live in a low cost of living area you get paid less. Live in a high cost of living area get paid more.

Before you start jabbering about how companies don't do that... They do. Just because you don't work for one, or don't know about your own companies policies you should look it up. Most companies are pretty discreet about it and people don't talk about taking pay cuts to move to low cost of living area but it is common.
- Yep. The way I've heard of it actually happening to folks where I work is when they moved during the pandemic their pay didn't immediately change. But when they got their promotion, they got a 0% percent increase because that was when they recalculated the cost of living adjustment. So maybe they got a 12% raise, but moved to a place with a 15% lower cost of living. So they weren't going to piss off the employee by rewarding with a pay cut, but use that as the time to reset compensation leveling.
Seems like everyone in this thread is okay with pay cuts as it is less than the benefit.
- This article is saying the average is ~$500 a month. Imagine pre pandemic work norms. If your employer offered you $500 less a month, but the trade off was you got to work fully remote, would you take it?
So you're saying people should take a paycut because they are more productive?
- It's more having your cake and eating it too. When pandemic hit and you got to keep your salary and work remote, maybe move to a cheaper area, no one complained that they kept all the benefit of the in office pay. But now that you got to keep the same pay, and are asked to come back into the office, you aren't suddenly making less money. You're just paying for the cost that was always expected as an employee that was hopefully accounted for in giving you a reasonable salary.
  
  And some of these costs that add up to "a month of groceries" can be mitigated by having flexible in office policy. It's not that transport takes a month of groceries. The cost is transport + childcare + pet care. For some childless and petless workers the cost of in office transport isnt that bad, and might be tax free if you have programs for it. And child care and pet care can be reduced with flexible in office requirements. Some companies used to let people bring their dogs to the office, for example.
I expect to be paid based on the value of my work, not based on how much my boss personally thinks I need. If I ever got a pay cut that was justified by my own low cost-of-living, I would quit on the spot. Don't punish me for being frugal. I'm saving for as early of a retirement as I can afford.
- Cost of living adjustments are real. The value of your work is based in part of market rate. And part of that market rate is based on location due to various costs of livings, taxes, laws etc. I think the thing is the pre pandemic salaries should have accounted for those factors, but when those factors change due to people moving etc. it is reasonable to expect the question to be asked about adjustment. You're not being punished for being frugal.

"OH no. Those poor white collar employees"

So anyways, here I was breaking my body doing a job that has to be done in person but earns less pay and benefits when al.....

"I can't work from home, so nobody should!!!"

Look, when people who don't not need to be present at an office can stay at home, it frees up the streets/trains etc for all the people who do. WFH benefits everyone, except owners of office buildings I guess, but fuck them lol
So you are someone who will pull down others to your own level of misery? What a jealous piece of shit you are.

You think Execs and Managers come in to the office daily?
And you know what? I think you should be earning more and have better benefits. Better than me, probably.

We have no quarry with each other. All of us deserve better.
Lol. I remember when Mark Shields said in one of his last appearances on the PBS News Hour something like "The democratic party used to party of the PBR and a whiskey shot, but now it's the party of Sauvignon Blanc." I guess I'm technically a tech bro, but I think you are spot on pointing out this conversation about "work" ignoring very important work that can't be done remote.
We're the same 99%. They've tricked you into misdirection of your resentment.
With a large increase in the number of office workers working from home, cafes opened in the suburban centres near me. Though the cafe workers have to work from work, it's certainly a benefit for them to be able to work walking distance from home instead of an hour bus commute away with expensive parking when they had to work in cafes near the offices

WFH moves the support jobs closer to home

Sure it doesn't help if you're in construction, but it's a net good for many people
Good. Sounds like you're a jealous asshole who gets what you deserve