The workers pushing back on the return to the office - BBC Worklife

Early in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a company-wide memo telling staff they would be required back in the office by early September. Workers would be expected to be present for three days a week, with two days of remote work.

Some Apple employees weren’t happy – and pushed back with their own letter. Addressed to upper management, their message expressed frustration about the new policy, saying that it had led some employees to quit. Apple’s pre-pandemic policies discouraged remote work, but post-Covid-19, employees are challenging what they called “a disconnect between how the executive team thinks about remote/location-flexible work and the lived experiences of many of Apple’s employees”. 

Apple staffers aren’t the only ones contesting plans to return to the office. Workers at Washingtonian magazine, a US-based publication, walked off the job when their chief executive Cathy Merrill wrote an op-ed that appeared to threaten employees’ job security if they refused to return to the office five days a week. Other employers still appear to be talking tough, however; last week, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman said he’d be “very disappointed if people haven’t found their way into the office” by early September. “Then we’ll have a different kind of conversation.” 

As employers start to unveil their post-pandemic visions for work, pushback movements from employees keen to retain their work-from-home privileges are in nascent stages. But localised protests may be indicative of more widespread resistance among workers to revert to pre-pandemic patterns. Employees may well feel they've proved they can be productive at home –  and that the reasons companies say they want them back in-office don't stack up.

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