The attack on remote work by L'Oreal's CEO has really triggered me. This quote, in particular:
"And it's also more fair to workers because we have lots of young people who have small houses or have young kids and working from home is actually very bad for their mental health," he said.
Please.
I'm guessing he didn't ask the same "young people" how they enjoyed their hour-long commutes, or offer to rent them local shared space to help their mental health.
I'm re-posting something I wrote in the fall, adapted to the new French King of Corporate BS:
The back-to-work debate is really a housing debate.
Why? We put all our offices in a small area downtown. Then, we restricted the ability to build housing nearby, kept interest rates as close to zero as possible, inflated the salaries of executives and didn't build enough transit. House prices predictably went through the roof, with many of those executives buying up the limited supply to "plan for retirement." Meanwhile, wages for non-executive workers stagnated.
In short, we pushed workers further and further away from where they work in order to find housing they could afford.
For a really long time, people just accepted very long commutes because there was no choice. Then COVID hit, everyone stayed home, and for many companies it kind of worked. Suddenly, it seemed like there WAS a choice and work could fit more seamlessly into peoples' lives. Moving even further away so families could buy houses in nice neighbourhoods became possible without making massive career sacrifices.
The shift to work-from-home seemed like the only answer to what had become an increasingly untenable problem. Many didn't realize how bad things were. It took COVID to show how much better it could be for so many people.
At my company two of our people have really long commutes to the office. Before COVID I never mustered the empathy to suggest they work from home most of the time. But after COVID showed us a better way, it would simply be an act of cruelty to force them back 4 or 5 days a week. I am grateful that their work fits more comfortably in their lives than it did before.
Look - work-from-home isn't perfect. There is less spontaneous creativity in our office. I miss the camaraderie and there's less laughter in my work day than there was. But we built an office-housing-transit system that produced a lot of misery and a lot of missed family life mostly for younger, middle-class workers. The trade-off wasn't fair and we did it to ourselves. We should be grateful to have been shown a better way.
So, the next time some €10.33M a year CEO with a sweet underground parking spot and a house in Les Village Ternes talks about "passion" and "sensorial enrichment", reporters might want to ask them a question or two about the housing crisis, and see whether they're still so comfortable with their position.
https://lnkd.in/gg2jfzgN
Director, International Student Recruitment l Former Project Manager l Ex-Appen l Ex-GameStop l Ex-Disney l
1yNot surprising. Earnings are this week and probably won't be good. Publicly traded companies eliminate headcount to reduce losses/inflate earnings before reports are due all the time. You all will be fine in the end. I don't know a single person who left that company and isn't at least as well off, if not substantially better off.