This is not entirely accurate — as much as 69% of all full-time employees worked remotely during the pandemic: https://news.gallup.com/poll/355907/remote-work-persisting-t...
While we certainly do have professions that require in-person presence, it’s not every role in those professions and certainly many more people can enjoy the benefits of remote work. Those who cannot should be rewarded for that and added enjoy benefits/guarantees to compensate.
This is more or less the opposite of what happens to these professionals - they are often those who are paid the least and work the longest hours under hourly contracts on multiple jobs (because, if they worked more in a single job, the company would have to give those benefits).
And going to work with COVID symptoms because they can't live without payment.
That’s a very grotesque illustration of perverse incentives. Ask anyone, I doubt they’ll tell you that it’s worth having a sick person show up to work over providing sick leave/benefits and yet, here we are.
This is, with the most possible respect, a position of great privilege. Most people in the US are not remote workers that get to work 7 hours a day. They are expected to be physically present doing things like retail service work, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, etc.
The average HN user is in a very specific demographic that has benefited enormously from recent economic trends, a benefit that is not distributed evenly. Many (most?) people are working more then they ever did for an increasingly smaller piece of the pie.