Oliver Bateman Does the WorkVerified account

If it were that easy to go remote and fleece workers it wouldve happened w/o a pandemic. Many currently remote positions are working at reduced productivity rn. There are material advantages to in-place workers. Technology may overcome these barriers in the future though.

There was a lack of knowledge or a skepticism towards remote work - now companies have already been forced to bear the cost of running those experiments. Plenty of large companies are now announcing "permanent work from home" policies. The inertia is gone now.

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking but i think that there are more institutional/technological barriers to offshoring than inertia. Lots of companies start out being remote but move to physical locations. However, this would fit the trend towards proletarianization of the PMC

Yeah, I'd like to hope so too! Even if those barriers are real, I suspect there will be plenty of short-term profitability concerns that would make it attractive to replace expensive workers with workers who are 30% less productive but 50% cheaper.

We're making roughly a quarter of furloughs in the company where I work permanent ... "converting" them to "demobilized" and "alumni" status

What does that mean ? Are they fired ?

In so many words, yes.

would you say that’s because there’s been a loss of revenue due to the pandemic?