Good Morning,

There’s truly never a slow week when tracking remote policies and analyzing how these decisions will impact US workers.

And it brings out some wild opinions. I’ve amassed a sizable collection of poor takes on remote work - like this one below likening WFH to vacation - but if you come across any in the future, please send them in. Future me will enjoy proving we were on the right side of history! Thanks for joining me 😊

For now, let’s focus on the 10% of his tweet that isn’t garbage: “Remote is a great lifestyle.”

Travel

Are you looking for something more long-term than the Wander travel options we mentioned last week?

If so, Remote Year is one of the original mainstream digital nomad experience companies, chartering “group work and travel programs for remote workers in 80+ destinations.”

Travelers can pick from trips lasting 1, 4, or 12 months, living and working around like-minded remote workers in cities across the world. If you’re new to the remote travel concept, Remote Year is a safe group to take the plunge with.

Need to know

A headline for a New York Times article this week read “How Remote Work Connected Employees Making $19 an Hour and $80,000 a Year.”

It finds a connection that, as the title implies, would not be immediately expected on the surface. The author explores policies at two of America’s largest companies, Amazon and Starbucks, which both contain extreme dynamics and complex expectations for their many employee tiers and roles - which in reality are much wider-ranging than $19/hr and $80,000/yr.

In the past few months at Amazon, there have been petitions, a 30,000-member Slack channel, and even a recent walkout all devoted to protesting the company’s return-to-office policy.

After employees proved that they could work effectively from home - and in many cases, made permanent location changes accordingly - being required to work from an office seems unnecessary.

These complaints have been met with solidarity from warehouse employees, who have their own battles with management to solve for. One might hope that if common ground can be found in the push against RTO, the warehouse employees may also be able to negotiate for their preferred policies.

At Starbucks, a similar scene has been playing out, though instead of warehouse employees, it’s the store workers who are fighting for policies that are different from those of their corporate colleagues.

Even so, when corporate employees sent in their return-to-office petition to Starbucks’ upper management, the petition included “free and fair union elections across stores” alongside the RTO reversal request. As with Amazon, employees recognized that remote work is not applicable to every Starbucks employee, but it’s an important aspect of working conditions for the employees who do have the ability to be remote.

Whether attempting to play up the camaraderie between these groups or simply stretching for reasons to use paid-for corporate space, Starbucks management has implied that corporate employees should work from their offices because many of the store workers never had the ability to work remotely.

As anyone can tell, that’s comparing apples to oranges, and Starbucks store workers - just like Amazon warehouse employees - see the difference.

🗝 Key takeaway: when you argue for remote work, focus on your individual role and your ability to complete specific, measurable work outcomes.

Management might push the conversation toward other employees, divisions, roles, or inputs that are not related to your individual output. Steer the conversation away from those distractions and focus on the value YOU will bring to the company.

Recommended

• Frontier’s All-You-Can-Fly pass is back for Winter 2023-24 (Frontier)

• Financial traders are far less likely to commit fraud when working remotely (Axios)

• Home Depot is selling prefab tiny homes / standalone home offices for under $50k (USA Today)

• David Sacks is the latest tech leader to downplay remote work (Twitter)

• What workers really care about: pay, managers, flexibility, and more (Washington Post)

Today, phase one of the City of Austin’s RTO policy (which we wrote about last week) goes into place. Given some additional pushback a few days ago, it looks like they’ll be off to a rough start. Fingers crossed some sense is found before the larger changes are enforced.

Cheers,
Grant