Grrr. I had my blood pressure taken today and it was perfectly normal. Then I read this Slate article and it shot through the roof. Or so I imagine. I know for sure that it infuriated me. In the article, Ben Mathis-Lilley discusses the views of Steve Rattner on remote work.
Rattner, an “investment asset manager” and on-again/off-again politico, is complaining about all those remote work riffraff who simply don’t want to work as hard anymore and would rather goof off at home. He quotes Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon to support his thesis that remote workers have grown soft, and no longer want to hustle. The reason they feel comfortable with this, Rattner says, is the remarkable growing prosperity “we’ve” experienced in the last few years.
Mathis-Lilley puts the lie to this nonsense and then burns it to the ground. It’s fine, he says, to talk about this remarkable growth in prosperity as long as you are in the top 1% or, better, top 0.1% of earners. If you’re anyone else, not so much: your earnings have been essentially flat.
In order for the great unwashed to commute to work it costs about \$6,000 a year and if they have 2 or 3 children another \$40,000 a year in child care. That’s a lot of money for someone with no real increase in income. Rattner, on the other hand, lives 10 minutes away from work (in Manhattan) and could easily walk to work if he liked.
As the title suggests, Rattner and his ilk really are like Marie Antoinette in their inability to comprehend the problems that commuting to the office imposes on the average employee. If you have a nasty, suspicious mind like mine, you’ll also suspect that the main driver of their back-to-the-office crusade is really about wanting to control every second of their employee’s life, or at least of their workday. But probably life.