The problem with that logic is that plenty of people were hired as remote during the period when in-office was not mandatory, so it's not "reverting" them to any conditions they had previously. I joined a distributed team at AWS late in 2021 for a fairly new product where the managers weren't even all in the same areas as each other. When the "return" to office happened, we were so spread that we had three separate offices they would accept us going to in person and none of them was even roughly in the same area as me (I live in New York, the options were in Virginia, Texas, and Seattle) and that we'd have to relocate, transfer, or quit. Due to a medical situation, I wouldn't have been able to go into an office even in New York without health risks for my fiancee, and it wasn't clear to either me or my manager what exemption I should apply for, let alone how long it would last without being renewed. My fiancee and I had no intention of moving even when the medial situation got resolved, so given amount of stress that would ensue from having to navigate the internal bureaucracy (which potentially would have to be repeated in the future, depending on the length of the exemption and how the medical situation progressed), and uncertainty that they'd even approve the exemption each time I'd have to apply, it didn't seem worth the effort, and I left pretty much as quickly as I could.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.
Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.
Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.