Executive Summary:
Innovation is hard, rent seeking is easy. Won’t someone please think of the poor rent seekers?
(Goes for just about any legacy industry. I’m looking at you, fossil fuels…)
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Exactly. A reasonable stipend for home office equipment would still save a company millions of dollars per year over commercial office space.
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If this lasts, the long term solution may be to convert commercial office space to residential space.
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But, you see, retrofitting empty office space into housing means they have to (gasp) spend and loan more money (pay no attention to the jobs created for those poor people DB is so very concerned about). Furthermore, since it can’t all be Woolworth Building billionaire condos, that might make urban housing more (gasp) affordable, allowing police and firefighters and teachers and the working class to actually live in the communities they serve without seeing most of their salaries going to pay the rent. Plus it will take time, meaning the quarterly numbers (BlessedBeTheirName) won’t look good.
No, of course Luke Templeman and his bosses are going to take a shot at screwing over workers instead. Creative destruction for thee, not for me.
Really, do these people want re-purposed programmable hydraulic slicy bois? Because this is how you get re-purposed programmable hydraulic slicy bois.
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That savings pays for the resources that I use while working from home, (like a higher energy bill) so they can still go fuck themselves.
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How about just tax the ones who make what the average Deutche bank employee does, those making 93K and up? And if they have a more expensive house, tax them more? Of course make it per house?
Remember, the ‘T’ is silent.
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There’s only so many times you can liven up your day with a trip to the bathroom before you accept that working from home has become unbearably lonely.
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I’ve got a dog to keep me company. Humans are annoying for the most part and distract from work (I’m deeply introverted, WFH is wonderful for me).
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I may be reading between the lines, but DB’s proposal is using concerns about one group of workers to offset diminishing rental investments should businesses continue to downsize their offices. Real estate investors, including bank investment holdings, lose money when businesses shrink their office spaces.
My husband was one of a handful of employees who has been WFH for over 15 years. His employer saw the real estate writing on the wall and has been slowly giving up business space over the last 10 years, and had been moving most of its employees to a WFH model pre-2020. Covid just sealed the deal.
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Plus I get all the “ridiculousness and banter” I want from actual friends I’ve met on my own terms. No Lumberghs or Michael Scotts, no coffee breaks or cake parties required.
I have to wonder how much even the unusual campus perks of places like Google and Apple are missed these days by techies. Also, truly collaborative workplaces are relatively rare and mostly smaller-scale creative-class businesses.
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I completely agree: WFH is wonderful.
For you.
There are different perspectives, although I think (almost) everyone would agree that DB - and Luke Templeman in particular - would be horrible to work for, either WFH or in the office.
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No mandatory meetings where the execs who make 5 times what you do make phony ass speeches about how the company is really “a family”; totally ignoring the fact that they laid off more than 90 people over the two previous years, both times right before the Xmas holidays.
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That’s another hidden concern of corporate America in this discussion: the exposure a lot of highly paid no-value-added managers and what David Graeber called BS jobs. I’m sure that DB has a disproportionate share of both.
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Energy bills and whisky. I’m saving enough for a nice bottle of scotch a week. DB can’t have any of it.
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I can’t work from home, because a substantial part of my job involves face to face or phone contact. Additionally, I have been told that if I use my home computer to work from home, even something as lightweight as logging into my staff email account, if ‘irregularities’ pop up, my home computer can be audited by my employer, i.e., the state. They are not offering to let me take home a computer to use.
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Move along - nothing to see here. Just the usual toxic parasites doing what toxic parasites do - weakening and ultimately destroying their hosts.
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If that’s your tragedy, you may not have figured “work” out.
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Are you a librarian, by chance? That seems a bit draconian for library work.
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Yes, there have been several campaigns by NGOs called “Krötenwanderung” to encourage people to move away from Deutsche Bank and others to become customers of more ethical banks.
(“Krötenwanderung” means “toad migration” but is used as a pun here, since money is colloquially called “Kröten” = toads and the idea is to move your money elsewhere.)
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