The Back to the Office Movement of 2025

The Back to the Office Movement of 2025

The motive for the Back to the Office movement touted by Trump and the Republicans comes to us as a legacy of slavery. Recall slaves worked as farm labor, domestic servants and gradually some of them as craftsmen trained by their owners to exploit as contract labor. Historian Ron Cherno reports George Washington hired out his surplus slaves.

The slaves of 1787 to 1860 made up a significant minority of the population in a country of small farmers, independent tradesmen but minimal manufacturing limited to textiles and some iron smelting. Before 1860 slaves were the working class given the white population primarily earned a living as farmers or self-employed entrepreneurs. Southern plantation owners needed a mass labor force to harvest cotton and tobacco, which concentrated employment among a limited number of wealthy employers. Where the modern corporation hires the working class for wages, the antebellum plantation owner had working class slaves paid-in-kind.

Recall slaves worked and lived under arbitrary rule in a system of forced labor; resistance brought immediate reprisal as physical abuse and corporal punishment from colonial times. These habits of arbitrary rule over slave labor have made it easy for America’s capitalists to expect obedience for the hired help long after slavery ended. It can be no surprise the south provides the greatest resistance to job rights and union organizing. The lingering effect of more than a century of arbitrary rule during slavery make it easy for contemporary capitalists to expect they have arbitrary authority over today’s employment and the right to devise various types of reprisals against working class demands for a measure of respect and the job rights to go with it. Slavery lives in the employer expectations of today.

The Back to the Office movement comes to us as an especially petty example of corporate contempt and class war politics. Since managers and supervisors have had laptop computers and the Internet to pressure employees to be available at home in the evening and on weekends for many years, the suggestion they must be at “work” 9 to 5 on weekdays appears especially idiotic. Commuting imposes financial costs on employees and also the time and energy squandered getting “there” that cannot be defended as good for productivity or profits. Never assume as economists like to do that corporate America wants to maximize profits; divided social classes generate inequality as a perk of the upper class.

America’s corporate autocrats have always known the arbitrary, abusive and demeaning use of authority directed down through a hierarchy to the farm fields, the shop floor, the cashiers check out, or the secretary’s desk brings anger and resistance from some, but fear and hesitation from others. Corporate America promotes these internal divisions when they look the other way and encourage or ignore the abuses of supervisors and managers. The more assertive will fight the abuses, while the timid and cowardly withdrawal or adopt the stance of their authoritarian employers. The historical record of union busting documents the deliberate use of intimidation and verbal deceit for dividing the working class.

Sowing division among the working class through dissension on the job has worked well as a continuous disruptive force in opposition to the working class and their political and economic solidarity. Journalist and author William Allen White wrote of the Republicans of the 1920’s era as “shocked to tears at anything that tore apart the identity of wealth with brains.” Such a view follows from an upper class hope for an acceptable justification for their wealth. Contrast that with today’s wealthy and well placed that delight in showing their contempt for the working class with a political campaign that includes Back to the Office.