Imagine yourself working at Apple. It’s April 2022. You’re being told by the higher-ups that you’ve got to come back to the office — by which I mean you’ve read a Slack message on your laptop. You continue your workday, pissed that your bosses don’t seem to understand that you can do this job remotely.
Then somebody sends you a YouTube link to a nine-minute commercial for remote work, telling the story of a group of people who quit their company after being forced to return to the office. The advertisement is by Apple, which is currently telling you to go back to the office. You punch your desk so hard that your screensaver deactivates.
It’s strange that the companies that have made so much money off remote work seem to be the most allergic to its possibilities. Google, which literally lets you run a company in a browser, has been forcing workers back to offices three days a week.
Meta, Apple and Google are industry leaders, yet they are leading their industry backward — back to offices where people will do the same thing they did at home.
Meta, which has lost billions trying to make us live in the computer, has also made people return to the office. In reading almost every remote-work article that has been published for a year for my research, I have yet to find a single compelling argument about why employees should go back to the office.
“In-person collaboration” and “serendipity” are terms that make sense if you live in Narnia and believe in magical creatures. In reality, office environments resemble our remote lives, only with more annoying meetings and the chance to smell our co-workers’ lunch choices.
The tech industry pretends to be disruptive, but is following a path forged by older companies like Goldman Sachs. How is it that Apple and Google, the companies that effectively gave us the ability to remote work at scale, sound like they’re reading from a generic New York Times anti-remote op-ed?
My argument is simple: Despite all of the rosy startup-driven mantras that make up the Valley, I believe that the tech industry has the same outright disrespect for labor as every other industry. It created an underclass of labor in the gig economy. The tech press acted as a willing accomplice in reframing and euphemizing outright abuse of contract labor. Venture capitalists pumped billions into companies that lobbied, in short, to diminish the power workers have over their own lives.
Tech companies saw incredible profits in 2021 and began hiring at an unprecedented scale, suggesting the good times would never end. Then they proceeded to lay off tens of thousands of people the second things got difficult. Apple and Amazon have been aggressively anti-union, and Meta fundamentally screwed over its service workers this year.
On a micro level, there is a streak to some founders that suggests that there is nobility in labor — that there is romance and joy to be found in destroying your life to make a company. To steal my own epithet, the Valley too regularly describes itself in the trappings of Calvinism — the ideas of vocation and purpose; that everything they do has a higher ideal than “it’s a thing that people will use that will also make us money.”
When Andreessen Horowitz invested in world-famous failure Adam Neumann’s new startup Flow, Marc Andreessen described investing in a business that buys apartments, rents them and potentially sells them as “connecting people through transforming their physical spaces.”
Famous founders are regularly treated as gods that can do no wrong, even if their wrongs are so well chronicled that Jared Leto played them on TV. The “labor” that the Valley applauds is too often just a white guy who was able to pull the right levers in the right order.
The tech industry may have created things that truly changed the lives of billions, but it has failed to operate as any kind of “progressive” industry. The gig economy has normalized the abuse of workers and building startups has led to burning your personal life to the ground being normalized as a means of hitting ARR targets. Our largest companies are attempting to push back one small glimmer of light within several dark years in human history: Companies can function remotely, and their workers can work from anywhere.
Meta, Apple and Google are industry leaders, yet they are leading their industry backward — back to offices where people will do the same thing they did at home but in more annoying circumstances.
If we want things to change, venture capital has to stop supporting companies that don’t support their workers’ rights. If you are funding a company that has gig economy functionality, your due diligence should be around workers’ pay, working conditions and hours. In general, I predict that we’ll see a culture war within the tech industry between those who believe workers need a work-life balance and those who believe that we must sacrifice ourselves to the god of startups.
These are the same people who reject diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. They believe, somehow, that they are above scrutiny and can do no wrong.
There will be those who will call “treating workers with basic respect” some form of “woke politics,” to which I say kiss my entire ass. If you do not respect and support better working conditions for all kinds of workers, you are on the wrong side of history. If the tech industry doesn’t begin to internalize these lessons — that we must be better and we must treat each other better — it is no different than every undisrupted industry it claims to have upended.