19 Apr Is in-person work worth $100K?!?
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Remember back in February when a mansplainer told me this rot:
“So if the serfs have options, they’ll take them often for 10% less pay. And often, commuting costs serfs to reject job offers with long commutes, which is what people increasingly face due to high urban housing costs. Corporate America can dictate all they want. But as nascent companies increasingly go remote-only, remote work will be the norm for many office workers.”
Wonder if he’s still on hopium these days?
He predicted an INCREASE in remote work. Wowee zowee. Meanwhile, down here in reality:
Getting you back to the cube farm is so important that companies will spend that much money to do it. Yet you still have the hot air & hopium crowd telling you that most people will refuse RTO. Money that could have been spent on an entire salary being spent on relo costs instead.
“Companies are desperate to get workers back into the office — and some may be willing to spend tens of thousands on relocation benefits to do just that, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Businesses like Chevron and Walmart now require some new hires to go into the office after the pandemic forced many companies to adopt remote-work policies, according to the Journal. In turn, companies are willing to pay employees to relocate.” -MSN, Ibid.
How long do you think they will remain desperate? At what point do you think the situation will change.
Imma sit this down yet again:
–https://theintercept.com/2022/07/29/bank-of-america-worker-conditions-worse/
Lest you think that’s irrelevant, I can assure you, it’s not.
“Bank of America, which has a much bigger consumer lending business than Goldman, reported earnings of $8.2 billion that were up 15% from the first quarter of 2022.” –https://finance.yahoo.com/goldman-sachs-stumbled-while-bank-of-america-surged-in-first-quarter-112543509.html
We’re not exactly talking about some small, immaterial company no one ever heard of. These are the kinds of machinations that go on behind closed doors.
“Hiring platform ZipRecruiter noted there were 3.8 million recent job listings that mentioned relocation assistance, whereas fewer than 2 million job postings mentioned the perk in 2020, the Journal reported. 75% of job listings on Indeed now mention relocation benefits, per the Journal.
But it’s not coming cheap. Moving a new hire can cost $19,000 for a renter and up to $72,000 for a homeowner, ARC Relocation, a service that helps companies relocate workers, told the Journal. It’s even more expensive for companies to relocate current employees — from $24,000 for a renter to $97,000 for a homeowner.” -MSN, Ibid. emphasis mine
Relocation is not cheap. On top of that, if a company offers paid relo, they typically require you to sign a contract stating that if you do not stay with the company for a minimum of X time, you owe them the cost of the move.
Hey – remember when I said this:
Trapped in a home or an apartment + trapped in a job + trapped by finances / debt = trapped. Full stop.
We need to acknowledge this and stop tiptoeing around the topic.
–https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2022/12/04/its-being-trapped-full-stop/ published December 4, 2022.
This is the goal, folks. Think of “Hotel California”:
“Relax,” said the night man / “We are programmed to receive / You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave…”
If you’re trapped financially and location-wise, you’re pretty much stuck.
“Appian, a cloud computing company based in Virginia, paid 109 remote workers who joined the company over the last three years to relocate to Virginia, the Journal reported. One worker told the Journal that he is satisfied with the offer.
‘We’re still believers in in-person work,’ Matt Calkins, the CEO Appian, told the Journal.” -MSN, Ibid.
Another example of companies that may have been remote during the pandemic but do not wish to be remote now. If you don’t hold it, you don’t own it. If you don’t run the company, you don’t make those decisions.
“Earlier this month, JPMorgan execs told senior managers they will pursue ‘corrective action’ if they don’t go to the office at least three days a week. In March, Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, told employees that ‘the office is not optional’ less than a year after he told employees at Tesla to find new jobs if they refuse to return.
But many remote employees aren’t happy with the mandates. In March, Amazon, for instance, rejected an internal petition signed by around 30,000 employees to protest the company’s new return-to-office mandate. Some worry that going back to the office could make them less productive and hurt their work-life balance.
‘It’s already an ugly war, and it’s unfortunate,’ Abbie Shipp, a professor at Texas Christian University’s business school, told Insider.” -MSN, Ibid.
I told you that petition was not gonna work. 🤷🏻♀️ I wish I had been wrong on that, but I think I’m a bit too pragmatic to fall into unicorn toots and teddy bear hugs.
I’m thinking of Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class: “Though I wouldn’t call it a war exactly. That suggests both sides stand an equal chance of winning.”
Unfortunately for the rest of us, Corpo America + its politicians + its mass media have a lot of money and power. The average person living paycheck-to-paycheck and dealing with debt is not gonna sit at home with $0 income forever. Sorry, I don’t believe it.
🔮 Prediction alert: at some point, the relocation + sign-on bonus tactics will stop. I believe this will also coincide with the average person finally being “allowed” to know that unemployment is not 3.5% and we do not have a plethora of open jobs, period, let alone a glut of remote jobs ripe for the picking. The honey will turn to vinegar as these companies take an attitude of, “Work here in the office or sit at home and starve. The choice is yours.”
Not that it’s much of a choice – more of a dystopia. But that’s what I see coming. I hope I am wrong.
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