What does this pressure look like, in practice? Sternly written letters? Phone calls? What power does a city have over a private employer when it comes to employment decisions like this? If remote is everything people say it is, the cities should have no power to overcome improved performance and lower (in the long run) costs (due to lower or nonexistent rent)

Lots of companies get tax breaks, and a city can threaten to take them away if they don't bring employees back to the office.

"Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly."

"New Jersey paused its on-site requirement when Covid hit. Last summer, though, the state announced that companies receiving those benefits must bring employees back to the office about three days a week — a lower bar than before, but still challenging for firms struggling to hang onto workers in a red-hot labor market."

"The state [of Texas] said it will revoke benefits granted under the multibillion-dollar Enterprise Zone Program to companies whose employees no longer work on site at least half the time."

The article does go into pushback the states are getting from companies for imposing these, to be fair, but it's clear they have some levers to pull in order to coerce companies to bring employees back to the office.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

I am not sure why you, and others in this thread, keep stating a performance boost. Workers claim a performance boost while actual performance suffers pretty greatly

https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/remote-workers-less-productiv...

I don’t personally believe there is an actual performance boost. I think I is the opposite, and even where it might exist at the individual level I think it is certainly (to my eye) incorrect at the team and company level.

But I won’t make that argument because it is the third rail of HN comments. So I make all my arguments assuming WFH improves productivity.

You can also stipulate that short-term productivity didn't take a major hit for the most part while having concerns about onboarding junior people, reduced level of engagement on teams, weakened company culture, etc. It's hard to separate out other factors but it sure feels like that to me.

I agree with you on this as well, but this is HN and WFH is a shibboleth that you’ll get downvoted for questioning.

Think about it as if it was a private golfing club, where these guys (corporate executives, real estate developers, bigshot investors, local politicians and officials, chief of police, county and city judges) all hang out in the same bar and play golf together, and shoot the shit with each other, and go to each others' kids' soccer games and so on. I'm sure there's a lot of peer pressure for them all to kind of get along and scratch each other's backs so that everyone can profit at the expense of the rest of us schmucks who are not in the club. A phone call is probably the most formal that it would get!

I think this is mostly it. But a little more generously, a lot of business leaders do have civic pride and if remote work is going to collapse the city's tax base, that isn't about personal profit. There are practical and emotional reasons why politicians, business leaders, educational and healthcare institutions, non-profits etc. would not want this. And this all trickles down to voters - people don't want to live in a crappy place!