Zero opinion on the work-life balance question, because it's irrelevant here (this is not fundamentally a work-life balance issue, and people who work remotely

Zero opinion on the work-life balance question, because it's irrelevant here (this is not fundamentally a work-life balance issue, and people who work remotely have their own work-life balance problems). This is about whether or not you have to physically be in a particular place to actually perform your job duties. For a factory worker, yes you do. For an awful lot of information workers, you absolutely don't. Park rangers get to perform their jobs out amongst the majestic beauty of nature. Should we make it "fair" by forcing them to go sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights too? 100% remote work was a thing before the pandemic and it will continue to be a thing in the future. Companies that don't learn how to adapt to this will be at a disadvantage on this point. This cuts both ways, of course. If I can do my job "anywhere" and I live in an expensive place like Seattle, I should worry that I have to compete with people in very low CoL places, and that likely pushes my own market value down. That's life. But pretending we need information worker's butts in seats downtown to operate servers thousands of miles away from them is not going to fix the problem.