I find it interesting how over 20-30 years corporations have reprogrammed people to believe working from home (WFH) is a perk and not a burden. And, people are celebrating how progressive these companies are. Twitter or any other company is not being benevolent by letting employees work from home, they figured out that they can shift a lot of their cost of real estate, utilities, and office furniture and equipment to employees. Will they compensate employees for allocating area of their home to office work, spending more on utilities, buying furniture and other tools for work?
Companies used to provide lot of benefit allowances for using personal items, space and time for company work like, home office, equipment, personal car, phone, on-call, education and training, etc. Slowly, slowly these benefits have been discontinued for everyone, except top executives, in the name of cost savings for the company, and such costs were shifted to employees. Based on such history of taking away benefits from rank and file and giving to top corporate executives, I doubt any of the corporate cost savings from WFH will go to employees.
> I find it interesting how over 20-30 years corporations have reprogrammed people to believe working from home (WFH) is a perk and not a burden. And, people are celebrating how progressive these companies are.
There are a million and one examples I can think of, of companies repackaging burdens as perks while cynically using progressive reasoning to convince people to go along with it. Unlimited PTO, for example. Unlimited PTO is not unlimited, it's limited by whatever your boss gives you permission for. So say it's de-facto limited at 3 weeks. If you had explicit PTO of 3 weeks per year:
* It's a lot harder for your boss to arbitrarily stop you from taking it, especially if the year is almost over and you haven't taken it yet
* If you don't take, it, they're legally obligated to pay it out
But when it's "unlimited"
* Boss mysteriously rejects it, or puts arbitrary constraints like "no more than 3 days contiguous"
* If you don't take it, it's gone
Companies used to provide lot of benefit allowances for using personal items, space and time for company work like, home office, equipment, personal car, phone, on-call, education and training, etc. Slowly, slowly these benefits have been discontinued for everyone, except top executives, in the name of cost savings for the company, and such costs were shifted to employees. Based on such history of taking away benefits from rank and file and giving to top corporate executives, I doubt any of the corporate cost savings from WFH will go to employees.