"You know what they want?

They want obedient workers.

Obedient workers.

People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough, to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs, with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it." – George Carlin

David Graeber’s book on bullshit jobs blew the myth of office productivity wide open several years ago. The elites have been promising us shorter work weeks for more than a century now. We have the technology to make it happen. As we speak, they’re bragging about their new AI minions.

Of course, that article even admits that onsite employees aren’t more productive. They just find different ways to “goof off,” like shopping online or scrolling their phones. The real ire seems to stem from envy, that remote workers are capable of meeting their responsibilities while also doing healthy things and taking care of themselves, like taking a walk in the middle of the day or (gasp) even a nap. Ironically, wellness articles have been telling bosses to let their employees take walks or naps in the middle of the day for almost 20 years.

Many news outlets finally came clean last year and reported that a big chunk of companies might simply be using office return mandates as an excuse to lay off employees and “restructure” their workforce.

Anywhere from 12 to 20 percent of office space remains vacant. It’s worse than the 2008 recession. If these landlords can’t find a way to make money off their corporate real estate soon, they’re going to start defaulting on their loans. The landlords will go bankrupt, and banks will wind up with giant office towers they can’t sell. More than $1 trillion will go poof.

According to a piece in the Harvard Business Review, the $1 trillion will come due between now and 2026. That explains why CEOs keep making these edicts, and newspapers keep trying to trash remote work. As the piece explains, “The damage could metastasize into a full-blown financial crisis if scores or even hundreds of small and midsize commercial banks fail simultaneously.”

The Federal Reserve’s misguided war on inflation has made everything even worse over the last couple of years. By raising interest rates, they’ve motivated more companies to ditch their office leases. Now commercial real estate is in a death spiral that could tank the economy (again).

Major cities have spent the last several decades catering to these corporate landlords. Now their entire downtowns rely on workers for commerce. We’re talking about all those restaurants and coffee shops that serve breakfast and lunch to white-collar workers, and all the bars where people used to go and complain about work before they spent an hour commuting home.

Once again, the elite have gotten themselves into big trouble. They want the rest of us to bail them out. If they don’t want our tax money, they want us to give up our freedom and autonomy. They want us to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of capitalism to protect their fortunes.

It was always about control.