They were already becoming shitty by the late 90’s. I worked for them doing clerical jobs, and I’ve never known a bigger bunch of douche bags in my life. Absolutely horrible place to work where they only cared about what kind of BMW you drove and the size of your bank account.
I like the cut of your jib, friend. We should be working to build a society that encourages work from home. It’s a win, win, win. Lowers the need for vast office buildings that consume resources, reduces traffic and carbon emissions, AND makes life a little easier for many employees (like me).
This. Every time a banker or finance firm puts out a really shitty idea, we’ll automatically raise their taxes another 1%.
Right, it’s like a taxi company telling employees they have to provide their own cars now and then charging the drivers for the privilege of getting to use their own cars.
Though I guess that’s kind of what rideshare companies do now.
Along their same ideology, they should pay everbody that does online banking a 5% interest rate for online banking since they no longer have to open as many store fronts or employ as many office workers
When those in power start talking, the rest of us should listen. These are the people who have carelessly helped create scheme after scheme to enrich the .01% more and more. When it all blew up, they were too big to fail and got bailed out. Meanwhile the rest of us have had to play by the rules - so when our shit blows up, we’re fucked.
My point is, these people are probably going to get what they want. They always have - why would it be different this time?
There are people that were working from home or lived house and workshop, and was the normal status since the Egyptians, was almost the norm until the Industrial revolution.
The fact is the work organization that is sprung after WWII and especially after the '60, and went in par with urban sprawl, separating manufacture, commerce, residential area and agriculture is an unsustainable paradigm.
The car era permitted this and the telecommunications era could end this too…
DB and Wells Fargo were the only two Western banks so reckless and distressed that they were still betting on that notorious deadbeat and grifter to repay them decades after the others stopped lending to him. That, in addition to all the money laundering and cheating of consumers that’s made the news, has made their brands toxic laughingstocks.
Corporations like this just want to restore the unsustainable post-war “normal” (which was really an anomalous blip in history). Any politician who says this is an idea worthy of consideration or who tries to slip a disguised version past us should be slapped down hard.
That’s exactly what they do now. The “gig economy” is grounded in the idea of saddling workers with all of the disadvantages of the independent contractor while denying them the benefits of that status. It’s coming for us all, and has been ever since conservatives started saying that all employees should now consider themselves self-reliant, rugged individualist independent agents (unsaid: in thrall to all-powerful employers who control their access to health insurance).
Judging by the across-the-board negative/outraged reaction I’ve seen to this proposal*, they’re going to have to do serious work to cover it up and hide it if they want their pet politicians to implement it. They’ve tipped their hand, though, so we’re watching now.
[* The author of the piece, Luke Templeman, basically wiped his entire social media presence – including his LinkedIn CV – when it came out]
is a flat-out lie, unless remote workers are literally hiding any money they’re saving under their mattresses. If they’re spending it, investing it or saving it, they are “contributing to the infrastructure of the economy”. Just not in the way most beneficial to Deutsche Bank and its clients.
Maybe it’s the talk in Germany about making it easier to deduct a home office that is scaring this particular Heuschreckenkapitalist. My particular company is even letting people talke home monitors, whatever they need because it wants to encourage more home office, and looking into other ways of rewarding home office with cooking offers, things like that.
This has met with some moderate outrage here in Germany when it was annouced a few days ago. Thank god they don´t really have a say in these things. I´ve been working from home office for the better part of this year, I earn not much as it is. Seriously, fuck Deutsche Bank. They have a scummy reputation since the Schneider affair in the 1990s here. I did some temp work for them for a few months a couple of years ago, never seen so much institutionalized incompetence and shifting responsebilities in a workplace before and after. I hope the Orange Bastard drags them down with him in his death spiral.
In fairness, a tax wouldn’t go to Deutsche Bank. This isn’t part of their proletariat-milking operation; it’s part of their political lobbying on behalf of the owner class.
Kind of. The point of this particular memo is to try to cover their bad bets on downtown office developments. The revenues from this tax would be a way of doing that, at least if the tax didn’t disincentivise enough workers to go back the office and get back to dealing with their personal Lumberghs.
These rentiers definitely don’t want to tax other corporations, and the revenues certainly wouldn’t go to the workers at businesses that support the downtown office space ecosystem. The owners of many of those businesses aren’t going to waste time and money on maintaining downtown locations if the offices remain empty. Even if they’re getting some of those tax revenues they’ll effectively be running non-profits benefiting their landlords.
So, they’ll close the storefronts, and instead the relief funds will go to the landlords and developers so that they can pay off Deutsche Bank and other mortgage holders in the absence of rent from street-level and fully-staffed office tenants.
The real solution is to tax the corporations that are, guaranteed, saving more than 5% in cost per employee by not having to provide expensive square footage, buy equipment, and keep the lights and HVAC on (some corporations are also taking this as an opportunity to reduce salaries for remote workers). Put those revenues into a general relief pool for non-remote workers displaced by WFH. Deutsche Bank, in that scenario, can play by the wild and wooly rules of the “free” market it likes to tout when it’s not caught going hat-in-hand to bad ol’ government and take its bloody haircut.
As a yank, thanks for the foreign insight. I’ve been WFH for months, too, and I’ve also found the same difficulties as it sounds you are hitting against.
