Remote Work Empowers Workers. Conservatives are using Pandemic Culture Wars to Target it

The Trump Administration's flimsy justifications for ending remote work for federal workers are based in grievance politics

In March 2020, the world shut down, and many workers were afforded a privilege they’d never had before. Like the CEOs who’ve since ginned up panic over “productivity” concerns, they began working from home. And wouldn’t you know it? An analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that “remote work substantially contributed to productivity growth during the pandemic.”

For those of us who value workers’ rights, the news is similarly positive. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that “remote workers have the highest levels of engagement and life satisfaction.”

Forbes reported in 2022 that a survey of over 12,000 workers found that those who worked from home were “20% happier on average than those who didn’t have the ability to work from home.”

In the UK, the Sunday Times reported that even hybrid workers took fewer sick days than workers who were forced into offices each day, and 68% suffered fewer stress-related physical symptoms.

In addition to promoting better well-being and work-life balance, remote jobs are also more accessible for disabled people, especially at a time when COVID-19 continues to circulate completely unmitigated.

Reducing the necessity of commuting also has myriad positive social effects: for workers, it means more time with their families, to spend on personal hobbies, or resting before the day ahead. For the environment, it means fewer emissions. Consider the millions of people who could be working fully remote in our online, networked world, and what eliminating all those two-way commutes could do for the planet, day in and day out. We saw a glimpse of this world in 2020; carbon emissions fell by a record 7% during lockdowns. Of course, commuting was only a slice of this reduction, but transportation as a sector contributed the “largest share of the global decrease in emission of carbon dioxide.”

Then there are the potential housing effects. Businesses with remote staff save money by shuttering or drastically reducing office space, leading to commercial real estate oversupply. According to Scotsman Guide, a B2B magazine:

In a widely anticipated trend, an increasing number of office properties in the U.S. are in distress…Cities boasting a high concentration of tech companies with remote workers have been hit particularly hard by office vacancies, with Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver and Austin, Texas, all posting office vacancy rates above 25% in March…There were 11.9 million square feet of construction starts in 2024, according to the report, down from about 25 million square feet in 2023 and 50 million in 2022.

Less demand for office space downtown leaves more room for residential housing. Meanwhile, lawmakers are currently scrambling to pass legislation to make it easier for developers to transition properties from commercial to residential.

Looking at the landscape in 2021, workers certainly held the upper hand. People were accustomed to working from home by this time, some had moved away from their employers, offices had already begun to restructure, and it was clear that productivity had not been harmed by the remote work revolution.

A competent left and labor movement would’ve pressed its advantage, driving home these gains for workers and ensuring that these benefits wouldn’t and couldn’t be snatched back. Instead, unions, organizing groups, and left commentators sat back and watched as right-wing rhetoric about the “laptop class” became the central narrative about the pandemic shutdowns. Often, left publications even began to regurgitate these claims themselves.

At this point, right-wingers have spent years building their narrative about the lockdowns as a time of milk and honey for the evil “laptop” people. These “laptop class” people were the reason for all the negatives we associate with the pandemic- the virus, in this retelling, has been entirely wiped from memory. That, itself, is a stunning propaganda victory. People talk about children having to be “kept at home” as a tragedy, then attribute this tragedy, not to a novel virus that killed tens of millions of people worldwide- no, no- but to policy decisions designed to protect vulnerable people. In the conservative view, the millions of dead people are simply irrelevant. This is a dramatically, fundamentally politically far-right interpretation of the events of 2020.

It’s also become the go-to interpretation for people on all ends of the political spectrum, because the left has failed to provide a counter-narrative that acknowledges the necessity of protecting vulnerable people, the dangers of COVID, and the importance of the social safety net measures and worker protections introduced in 2020. Instead, claims about the “laptop class” have begun to infiltrate left spaces.

The claim that remote workers were abusing frontline workers by staying home was dreamed up by the capitalist owner class to set workers against one another, and as part of a larger narrative about pandemic protections being authoritarian and unnecessary. In truth, the more people who stay home during a pandemic, the less circulating virus, the better for everyone. The fact that frontline workers were - and are- exploited and underpaid, particularly so during the lockdowns, was not the fault of an amorphous “class” of remote workers, because “remote workers” are not a class. Rather, it was specifically the fault of the owner class, the CEOs, bosses, politicians who fight against minimum wage hikes, billionaires who fund politicians who vote against affordable housing and free healthcare.

And wouldn’t you know it? Those billionaires and politicians who forced “frontline” workers into factories in 2020 to be exposed to the virus are the same people forcing “laptop” workers into offices in 2025 to be exposed to the virus. If you are in a position to be forced into a workplace by your boss, you’re probably not the class enemy of the exploited masses!

The claim that remote work is bad because not everyone can work remotely is fundamentally an attempt to gin up resentment between workers in order to prevent benefits or privileges from accruing to anyone. This tactic is tried and true. “Wow, those people at McDonalds want $20 an hour- yet paramedics don’t even make that,” is a common argument conservatives trot out. Any time discussion of raising the minimum wage comes up you’ll find right-wingers claiming that raising the wage of one worker will insult another worker, who should be making more than them.

“Forgiving student loans will harm people who already paid their student loans,” is another such argument, setting the workers who’ve paid off their debt against those who haven’t yet done so. In each of these cases, conservatives try to keep workers from accessing new benefits by stoking the resentment of other workers.

Over the past few years, conservatives began to incorporate “laptop class” rhetoric into their culture war armory. It’s a canny way to keep public anger at wealth inequality focused away from billionaires, politicians, and bosses. And that framing has been central to the recent rise of Elon Musk and his DOGE minions; Elon famously demanded that federal employees return to in person work, as his fanboys across X gloated that their perceived “lazy” enemies would be forced to commute again.

DOGE, in turn, began slashing every department haphazardly, cutting everything from USAID to cancer research. Memes from right-wingers have circulated, mockingly informing government workers that they will have to get “real” jobs working in factories and mines. All of this circles back to the perception that “laptop jobs” are not “real work”, something which left organizers unconsciously reinforce when they accept and promote the lockdown grievance politics framing of the pandemic.

Of course, cutting the federal government is an age-old goal of conservatives, as has been the dislike of “academics” and people who are seen as “too educated”. But that’s perhaps why it’s unsurprising to find right-wingers build a culture war around the idea of “laptop people” working at home. What is surprising is to see unions fail to push to protect and expand workers’ new freedoms, and to see liberals and leftists buy in to the clearly bad-faith interpretation that people who work at home are lazy and exploiting “real” workers.

All workers - all people who work for a wage, who are dependent on their income, who cannot survive without their employer, who do not own the means of production, who are not of the ownership class- are real workers. Academics, factory workers, cancer researchers, bartenders, USAID employees, nurses, teachers, writers, actors, flight attendants, baristas. We all deserve healthcare, paid sick leave, to be well-compensated for our time, to work under the best possible working conditions, and to work under accessible conditions. For people who still have to work in person as COVID-19 continues to spread, that will mean upgraded air-quality in every public space as well as liability laws that protect workers from on-the-job infections. For people who don’t, remote work should be standard.

Capitalists like Elon Musk are willing to fight to bring workers back to offices, not for any rational or financial reason. It is a battle for control over the lives of workers, and it is being fought with psychological weapons, with grievance politics and lockdown resentment. Are we willing to fight back in kind? Are we willing to articulate a vision for a future that acknowledges the successes of the past? That snatches back the pandemic narrative from the right-wing and declares, actually, despite the tragedy of COVID-19, remote work was an unmitigated success for workers, employers and the planet, and we are going to fight to keep it?

The right has spent years spinning a narrative about early pandemic measures - imperfect measures nonetheless that saved millions of lives, kept people out of poverty, provided people with the ability to work remotely, and more, during a tragic emergency. In response, the left has continually swallowed the right-wing narrative about these measures, accepted and promoted right-wing framing, and then expecting the public to somehow tack left-wing ideas onto the end of a right-wing worldview.

If you start from the premise “we should’ve let a million more people die rather than switch to remote schooling and close restaurants” you’re not going to end up at “Medicare-for-all” and you shouldn’t wonder why your country is falling to fascism. There are implications within these arguments; implications about the value of human lives, about the importance of protecting the vulnerable, about the primacy of the almighty dollar, and above all about the sacredness of the status quo. And ultimately, the argument for returning to the office, like every argument for the “return to normal”, is an argument for the return of the status quo.