My company is a subsidiary of a larger corporation. Corporate started an RTO mandate early last year, requiring all employees to be in the office Tues-Thurs. Then a few months later, they announced that they were closing the corporate headquarters and moving to a bigger city 40 miles away for “reasons”. No accommodations for people who live close to the old offices. They are expected to commute to the new location or quit/get fired. It seemed pretty clear, to me, that this was a soft way of forcing people to quit.

We are in a completely different location and we have the confounding issue of having given up our office lease during Covid and leasing a smaller office space that cannot accommodate everyone. So for the moment we are being allowed to mostly stay remote. However, the company has leased additional space and is in the process of building it out with the looming threat of also requiring everyone to be in-office. Even people who do not live (and have never lived) locally. If this happens, we will lose a large number of key employees who are unwilling to uproot their families for the sake of a job. They will absolutely be able to get new jobs elsewhere, and it will hurt our team massively.

But here’s the thing: we all love our work, and our project. So in response, we organized and voted to form a union. It’s not clear, yet, if this will save us from RTO, but it definitely puts us in a much better position to bargain with corporate.