Yep! This is it. Managers associate willingness to RTO with loyalty, so the idea is very much to induce voluntary, mostly non-regrettable attrition.

They're playing with fire.

Good. Let these dinosaurs burn their houses down while the smart companies allow flexibility. I’m tired of these psychological tactics of lying to employees about RTO decision making and making people feel like they’re not team players after what everyone went through with covid.

Boomers retiring, many women leaving the workforce during covid to focus on the family at home, globalization pushing up wages in the last bastions of cheap labor globally. Massive demographic crunch incoming over the next few decades.

It's going to a plan but not the one your thinking of.

What's the plan you are thinking of?

*Bogdanoff voice* Do you feel in charge, Mr. Rothschild? /s

A bit of artistic license perhaps, it's not really a plan. Pointing out the bucket of skilled labor is already empty and even the unskilled labor bucket is getting dry. Forcing layoffs now will probably bite them in future.

This seems to be the real reason that AT&T is pushing RTO, including telling people that have worked remote for their entire careers and never seen an office in 20+ years that they must relocate to a designated location either by the end of 2023 or 2024 depending on their wave. If they reject immediately they will get severance, but if they accept and don't relocate later they will be terminated without severance.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/at-t-tells-60000-m...

Although the story says that "managers" (e.g. non union individual contributors) get to choose from the 9 locations, that's not the reality, your work stream is assigned a designated location, there may be an alternate location you can petition to go to instead but it must be approved first.

Some orgs were able to utilize more office locations than the 9 listed. Didn’t matter much for me because I had to go back July 10th.