RTO mandates part of push-pull struggle to redefine employment amid ICT advances
By Frederick Pilot
September 7, 2025
Proponents of the argument that return-to-office mandates are a kind of layoff-in-disguise notched a grim win this week.
Business leaders from across the country told the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book that their RTO policies had “encouraged” a reduction in their workforces via attrition, rather leaders having to resort to layoffs.
The remark came ahead of a starkly weak jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed 22,000 net jobs added in August, where white-collar job losses were offset by gains in health care.
This isn’t the typical recessionary business cycle downsizing: layoffs either directly — or indirectly via attrition as described here. It’s something more fundamental. It’s a debate about how employment is defined as information and communications technologies virtualize and decentralize knowledge work.
RTO mandates are an attempt to adhere to the traditional definition of employment: showing up at the office. That fits with the legal definition of employment wherein an employer determines when, where and how the work is done.
But that’s clearly no longer essential to employment as ICT has rapidly advanced and demonstrated its capabilities to support knowledge work independent of time and location and thus requiring transportation of knowledge workers. The assumption that employment must necessarily involve an office setting controlled by an employer is under challenge.
It’s not surprising employers prefer the traditional definition of employment since it’s they who are doing the employing. But the knowledge workers they employ have a different perspective.
It was dawning years before the pandemic’s social distancing measures and then solidly reinforced during it. It’s now being reinforced again with RTO, requiring work in a cube farm, videoconferencing and otherwise communicating on their computers with co-workers nearby that they could easily do elsewhere.