The end of work-from-home? On ‘Office Space’ and the spatial fix

Released in 1999, the cult classic film “Office Space” satirizes the monotonous daily existence of a group of white-collar office workers. The movie opens with a familiar scene of individual drivers trapped in bumper-to-bumper highway traffic – one byproduct of suburban sprawl to which Columbus has not been immune.

It wasn’t until Covid hit 20 years later that this dynamic changed. With stay-at-home orders issued, highways and offices emptied out, creating a new white-collar culture of remote and hybrid work. Now that companies and politicians are calling for employees to return to the office full-time, some workers are pushing back, questioning the decision to end work-from-home when there’s evidence it might increase productivity while also aiding recruitment and retention.

“That Fucking Petition”

Earlier this month, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine issued an executive order requiring state workers to return to the office five days a week beginning on March 17. He cited operational effectiveness in his reasoning, but not everyone sees it that way.

The Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, a union for state workers, credited telework with improving worker health and reducing costs for office expenses. And in the Columbus Dispatch, guest columnist Gleb Tsipursky argued that these kinds of orders can lead veteran employees to resign, which he said happened after Biden introduced a plan calling for a return to the office 60 percent of the time. Issues of increased child-care costs and transportation are among the concerns often cited by workers. 

Downtown businesses, however, have advocated for the order due to the potential boost in revenue. “We have a good base of customers downtown, but I’m looking forward to meeting new people and seeing that increase with people returning to work,” the owner of Tasty Dawg, Mark Boughton, told ABC 6.

In a Dispatch letter to the editor, Joe Turek fired back, asserting that it was not the responsibility of workers to save downtown. “While I do not wish to see businesses fail, I do not believe workers need their employer or the government to tell them how and where to spend their earnings,” he wrote, going as far to call for a boycott of downtown businesses. 

In response to a petition from workers at JPMorgan Chase – the largest employer in Columbus with more than 20,000 workers – opposed to returning to the office, CEO Jamie Dimon told employees that they have the freedom to quit and work somewhere else if they wish. “Don’t waste time on it,” he said in a staff meeting when asked about the in-person work policy. “I don’t care how many people sign that fucking petition.”

Bureaucratic Anti-Production

Studies have shown increased happiness and productivity from hybrid workers, which raises the question of why corporations, conventionally concerned with maximizing profits, would be opposed to employees working from home. 

In “Office Space,” the workers repeatedly find themselves in scenarios that seem to slow their labor. Memos are sent from multiple managers repeating the same technical concerns about cover sheets on reports. “Naturally, the memo concerns a bureaucratic practice: it aims to induce compliance with a new procedure of putting ‘cover sheets’ on reports,” the late Mark Fisher writes in his book Capitalist Realism. “In keeping with the ‘being smart’ ethos, the management style in ‘Office Space’ is a mixture of shirtsleeves-informality and quiet authoritarianism.”

Fisher’s assertion that white-collar work environments produce their own style of shirtsleeve authoritarianism at the expense of productivity is especially pertinent in understanding why companies might force workers to return to the office despite the potential negative impact on mental health and productivity. The risks for CEOs like Dimon are real. In addition to the petition against returning to the office, some workers started a dialogue with the Communications Workers of America union, a rarity in the financial sector.

Spatial Fix

For those downtown businesses seeking more business from suburban commuters, the issue is larger than choosing where to eat lunch. The geographer David Harvey observed that with the accumulation of capital comes expansion, or a “spatial fix,” which takes place globally and locally. In Boomtown Columbus, Kevin Cox traces how the city transformed into its current state, one that seems to rely so heavily on the suburbs.

“The real estate innovations of the property developers, notably the office park and the suburban shopping center, meant some geographic concentration of activity at points on the urban periphery; something further stimulated by the creation of freeways circling the cities, largely in the ’70s,” he writes.  

Due to a variety of factors including white flight and the offshoring of industry, economic hubs and housing became decentralized, spreading to the outskirts of urban cores. Manufacturing plants closed down while offices in the suburbs and downtown financial firms increased. In Columbus, city leaders adopted an aggressive annexation policy that safeguarded tax revenue from these rapidly expanding suburbs.

“Protecting downtown property values is indeed an enduring obsession of the big landlords in U.S. cities and one supported by city governments given the significance of the property tax to their revenues,” Cox said of the return-to-office mandate in a February email interview. “This is a very American problem simply because of a suburbanization that seemingly has no limits – not just housing and shopping centers but massive office developments. In Columbus, think the northern arc of I-270 stretching from Dublin on the west through Worthington to Westerville and Easton.”

Like Fisher, Cox sees the return to the office as primarily being about control and hidden expectations. “There are only two reasons for having people in the office,” said Cox, a longtime geography professor at Ohio State University. “The obvious one is labor control. … The other reason is the significance of face-to-face contact to jointly consult on issues important to the firm. But in the age of Zoom, how important is that?”