They aren't discrete unrelated events. The intense thirst owners currently have for layoffs and job elimination is exactly a backlash to the increased power, au

They aren't discrete unrelated events. The intense thirst owners currently have for layoffs and job elimination is exactly a backlash to the increased power, autonomy and solidarity experienced by office workers during covid. Whether "all of the jobs" are "ever coming back" is the wrong thing to be thinking about I think. Some of them will come back some of them won't, which ones and when is well into the divination end of economics. But there is a conspicuous pattern for two generations now of jobs being reduced as much as possible by a combination of automation, outsourcing, algorithmic allocation (eg JIT scheduling), compartmentalization, contract & temp & gig labor. How does this fit into that pattern? So far the focus has been on jobs that can be straightforwardly automated at least partially, or easily broken into interchangeable tasks and allocated to contractors. A lot of jobs that are precarious and low wage now were middle class in living memory. What's left of the middle class is jobs that were resistant to that undermining due to technological limitations or entrenched union or regulation systems. What they're betting on now is that these new technologies will allow them to finally do this to the rest of us. They certainly will remove your stable job if they possibly can. The changes now are indications that they think they probably can for a lot more jobs than they could a few years ago.