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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I just realized something. Making people work in expensive office buildings is how the rich extract more wealth from the working class.
How can I get more money? Start a business! Perfect. Now how can I get more money from that? Well ... If I owned an office building, then I could rent office space to the business. But what is the business going to do with an office building? Ohhhh, the business, that I own, or am the majority shareholder in, the business in which I make all the decisions, could decide that employees have to come into the office. That I rent to the business, because I own the office building.
There's also the businesses nearby that serve the workers in the office building. Supposedly one of the reasons Amazon has pushed so hard on RTO is a lot of their executives have personal investments in those businesses and without Amazon workers in the area they were taking in way less money. When you happen to own the restaurant across the street it's in your interest to force your coworkers back into the office.
Interest rates were so low for so long, people tried to find other ways to grow their money.
Hey you want to borrow what is essentially free money to buy a building in charge tenants? It's a safe investment, right, there's no reason why businesses would stop needing office space, right,...right right.
And of course it goes deeper than that too. Even if a company doesn't have any real skin in the game as far as owning The real estate, shutting down the offices makes for some colossal problems. If your stuff's not already in the cloud you need to migrate everything. It changes secure networks, where do you meet with clients, when you don't have that huge beautiful branded space with a magnificent mahogany table in your conference room how do you impress your clients? Where do you have your new hardware shipped? Does your IT team now just store hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware in their house? How much are you going to lose when you auction off all the furniture?
This of course can all be overcome and answered but it's not easy. It's also not easily reversible.
Most of management cares a lot less that people are working from home and cares a lot more about having to decommission the actual offices because it's strategic and financial nightmare fuel.
The company I work for reduced our office space from 3 floors of the building to 1, started leasing out the other two, and now maintains only a few conference rooms for client meetings and similar functions, the server rooms and IT space, and a very small set of communal workspaces for people who want or need to work from the office.
Point being, there're always options less extreme than "Sell the entire building!".
We're in a larger building we don't own. Keeping one floor for the 5 people a week that come in is kinda insane. We need to move, but it's a shit sandwich, place is beautiful,
Because it is paid for with labor value that was stolen from the working class.
it raises the productivity requirements of the business to exist without actually returning any of the same money to the pockets of workers. Its similar to your boss owning your apartment and billing you for rent. You work harder, make less money and your boss makes more.
Its why there should be limits on the creation of shell companies and real estate trusts.
yes the business has to sell more product to rent a place than buy it, generally. This is why venture capital often does exactly this when they buy a corporation - they seperate all the real estate to a shell company and raise rents, which lowers profits for the original company forcing managers to try to extract more from workers to maintain profits and prevent closures.
I want to say this is exactly what happened to albertsons and the cut that gets made is a reduction in wage increases.
So explain why this is one of the many things Cerberus did after it bought albertsons-safeway and one of the resulting actions taken was to axe the pension program?
so why call people conspiracy theorists?
Yet it describes a real scenario that exists.
My understanding: In the case of Cerberus they wanted the original company to look less profitable' Afaik this is one of many accounting trick to make the portion of the business with the most negotiable costs (such as labor) as unprofitable as possible on paper so they can justify things like pension cuts. By splitting it up it obfuscates the finances to the unions and gives a negotiating advantage without really damaging investor profits and they can then sell the now more risky corporation off while keeping the real estate as part of their portfolio.
Like its not always this blatant and there's also some tax incentives and other things mixed in there but overall the goal of most businesses since the 80s is to move more money from wages ---> profits. If they can consolidate the market a little as well, that's bonus. "Competition is sin" after all.
Because they have to spend a fortune on rent and/or commuting to earn a living where all the jobs are.
Not forgetting that is is bosses who make the location decisions and they can afford to buy in those hugely expensive cities while the forced influx of workers pushes the price of housing up.
Companies should be taxed based on the in-work benefits required to make their location viable, regardless of their own wage structure.
Unless you've invested in property in the city you're forcing everyone into.