Totally, one of the boomer managers at my company was ranting about remote work a few months ago, saying stupid stuff like, “If somebody is remote working, how do I know they are actually working and not just mowing their lawn or cleaning their house?”

1. That’s the point, it’s better for people to have free time in their day to actually take care of life stuff.

2. If your management method requires you to constantly monitor your employees to make sure you’re squeezing every last ounce of “productivity” out of them, you’re a shitty manager.

3. How do you know your employees are working now and not just idly clicking their mice and staring at their screens zoned out? How do you know if an employee is deliberately sandbagging you and pretending they are at 100% capacity when they are actually at 75%?

All those questions betray the fact that they don’t actually care about their employees well-being, they don’t actually care about creating intelligent metrics for productivity or work capacity, they just want control. They want to impose the same brutality they had imposed on them.

It’s very similar to the mentality that those anti-student loan forgiveness folks have. “It’s unfair that I had to slave away to pay off my student loans and they don’t. So I want everybody else to suffer just as much as I did.”

Yeah but look deeper. Materially. Corporate real estate, billions of dollars of it sitting empty during the pandemic.

Same with abortion. Certainly about control to a point but mainly about US citizens not having enough kids to keep up the meat grinder in the future.

There’s always a material reason.

And money.