I don't understand why this issue is being raised now - surely they already have existing processes in place to deal with people who underperform, in which case those same processes can be applied regardless of WFH status. The fact that they haven't suggests that in the end work is being done satisfactorily and someone is just jealous or on a power trip.

A Company is not a charity, people are not kept on payroll just because

It’s easy for people to game the system and turn around and claim that it’s a discriminatory practice. It’s also easy for management to cut off an employee in bad faith to drum up a case for termination.

The easiest way to weed out the assholes is to change the rules for everyone, and purge those who are insubordinate. You’ll lose a few producers, but not as many as HN would leave you to believe.

Now that the economy is "back on track", we need them to be working - like they did before the pandemic, not like they did during the pandemic - so the work organisation gets back to a pre-pandemic state.

This idea that people were slacking off during COVID is a myth.

basically not only people took a 2 years paid vacation, they also could not be fired which incentivized the more parasitic workers to work even less

I know personally of a mailwoman working in Northern Italy for Italian Postal service (a public service) that went back to her home in Sicily and never showed up at work for 9 months because she could not be laid off.

So my mother in law who's also almost blind didn't get her mail for many weeks.

Nothing we could do about it. There were no consequences whatsoever.

Sounds nice until it's your bonus tied to revenues or people start nominating your mini-empire to shrink headcount.