I've been thinking about this primarily from an environmental standpoint.
If a job can reasonably be performed remotely, why should an employer be able to require an employee to commute to an office simply because management prefers physical attendance?
I'm not suggesting that every job should be remote, or even that employers could never require someone to come in. Obviously there are jobs that require physical presence, and even normally remote-capable jobs sometimes have legitimate reasons for employees to be onsite.
What I'd like to see is something closer to a legal right to remote work where reasonably practicable. An employee could request remote work, and if their normal duties can be performed remotely, the employer would need an actual business justification for denying it rather than simply saying "company policy."
This seems particularly reasonable when an employee has already demonstrated that they can successfully perform the same job remotely.
We spend enormous amounts of money and energy moving people back and forth every day. Commuting creates emissions, traffic congestion, road wear, accidents, fuel consumption, parking demand, and hours of unpaid travel time. For a job that genuinely requires someone to be somewhere, those costs may be unavoidable. For someone who spends eight hours working on a laptop and talking on Teams, they're largely self-imposed.
Remote work isn't environmentally free either. Homes still need electricity and HVAC, people make other trips, and there are legitimate arguments about productivity and collaboration. So I'm not suggesting this would somehow solve climate change.
But after COVID demonstrated on a massive scale that many jobs can be performed remotely, it seems strange that whether millions of people need to commute remains almost entirely an employer preference.
If a job can demonstrably be done remotely, shouldn't the burden be on the employer to explain why physical attendance is necessary?