It’s official: RTO mandates are driving workers to leave their jobs — and helping employers avoid layoffs

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.

In addition, business leaders also told the Fed that AI and automation was helping their organizations get by with fewer workers.

As businesses prepare for weaker consumer demand and higher levels of economic uncertainty, and the cooling labor market appears to confirm something that some observers have long suspected about the RTO push: Ordering workers to come in to the office is, in part, a way of asking them to leave the company altogether.

As Business Insider’s Aki Ito observed, employees who choose to quit in response to an RTO mandate (or any other reason) are generally not eligible to collect the severance or health benefits that laid-off workers often get.

“It’s layoffs on the cheap,” she wrote in May.

And the trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

Foot-traffic data show that office visits reached a new high in July, and more than half of Fortune 100 companies now have a full-time office requirement.

Meanwhile, former job-hoppers are now “job-huggers,” holding even tighter to employers who might otherwise wish to see them go.

As employers have taken away carrots like hybrid work, raises, and promotions, they’ve also been adding new sticks, like higher performance metrics, fewer direct managers, and cuts to benefits.

Some bosses, as Business Insider’s Juliana Kaplan wrote, just want you to quit.

Of course, these stricter RTO mandates have been gaining popularity for about a year now, and critics of the policies have not been shy about calling them layoffs in sheep’s clothing.

What’s different now is the once-booming job market is no longer providing cover in the form of growing payrolls, and employers themselves are increasingly acknowledging the connection.

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