I can almost guarantee this is about commercial real estate taxes more than productivity. If agency review is months behind, they need to hire more people, not force their existing employees to lose hours a day to commuting.
A fun little thought-experiment to inject into these debates is to analyze commute-hours and fuel costs as if they were-wages/expenses that the employer had to pay for.
When corporate RTO-advocates are faced with paying the costs themselves instead of pushing it all onto employees, suddenly it becomes "impractically expensive" and "wasteful".
Hey guys, commutes were always costly and (sometimes) wasteful, if you've finally realized that you can at least stop demanding employees undertake it for dumb reasons.
P.S.: To give a napkin-math example to show that it lands in the right order of magnitude...
Suppose Joe Exampleson has a 30 mile round-trip, taking 1 hour because company "core hours" match when congestion occurs. His car manages 30 miles per gallon and gas is $5/gallon, and we assume other car-costs are things he'd bear anyway even without the job. He normally earns ~$30/hr while working but here he has to act as a driver.
That's ~14.6% of his pre-tax income, or $8,750/year.
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Now, I know somebody will think: "That's too high because his real job is harder or more important and driving is easy, plus he can enjoy listening to the radio or whatever."
Those observations aren't wrong, but it risks a certain kind of... economic hypocrisy. Why would those aspects matter now but not for Joe's regular pay? It is safe to assume Joe's employer does not pay him based on how difficult or painful his job is, or even how important it is for the work to occur! No, they're paying based on the marginal cost of replacing him with somebody else.
I think the RTO policy is in part influenced by economic recovery research funded by the city [0]. My own conjecture is that it’s also influenced by SEPTA (regional transit) ridership recovery being a sticking point for funding from the state.
>I can almost guarantee this is about commercial real estate taxes more than productivity.
As simple as that. I was looking at the numbers of one of our partners that has gone bankrupt in Europe. He made the brilliant decision to invest everything in Office space just before Covid. They expected to recover money after Covid, but it is not happening.
A lot of big guys invested there, specially politicians, and of course expensive taxes. They will do everything they can to delay the sinking.
A city I know of mandated that the largest employer institute return-to-office or lose their tax breaks due to the impact it would have on the local economy of the city.
