After years of companies insisting that working without being physically in the office 5 days a week was impossible, it was the government saying "Your offices are closed" that made remote work at all common. I know remote work existed as a small niche before that, but I can't give capitalism credit for normalizing it.

Disabled people have been begging for years to have more flexible working arrangements, and have been constantly told "sorry it's impossible." But then covid shows up only for everyone to discover it's been possible the whole time.

> I know remote work existed as a small niche before that

You have to distinguish not physically being in the office from "working from home." A LOT of jobs (e.g. many sales job, on-site consultants, even my oil delivery guy) didn't involve being physically in the office much but weren't WFH.

Covid didn't invent remote work. I had been working remote for almost 10 years before Covid arrived. It merely accelerated a force that was already in motion.

"I know remote work existed as a small niche before that, but I can't give capitalism credit for normalizing it".

Remote work was a rapidly growing trend and had already doubled in the decade before Covid. Covid accelerated that growth but didn't create the trend.

Government and capitalism are terms that ultimately refer to people. In this case, given the context of caitaliso-democratic America, the very same people.

I don’t see any particular need to assume the ownership structure implies something about remote work. We could easily imagine that in a market socialist system people might be more willing to have WFH policies that benefit their co-workers.

I actually love capitalism, but I also have a healthy mistrust of those who have mastered it. I can foresee the real estate and commercial implications of mostly remote labor leading to legislation. In the US, we have a huge problem with private equity firms buying up companies, and if they own the IT companies and the restaurant companies, it might behoove them to lobby for RTO legislation to drive more traffic through their brick and mortar businesses.