My first office job was an internship at a law firm in Washington, DC. I was twenty years old and a college student, which meant that I was quite useless. I found out that it was one kind of torture to do pointless work for two or three hours a day—usually, producing research memos that no one read—and then another kind of torture to figure out how to do nothing until it was acceptable to leave the office at 5 p.m. I spent a lot of time texting two friends from high school, who were also newly stuck in office jobs of their own. I perfected my technique for napping while sitting upright.

My second office job was an internship at a management consulting firm in Manhattan when I was twenty-one. At work, I was either gossiping with my fellow interns, trying to figure out how to optimize my per diem for lunch, or messaging different people on dating apps while waiting for one particular person to text me back.

But my lackadaisical workdays as a management consultant weren’t entirely my fault. The office was full of distractions, and I found it difficult to focus. People were frequently pulling me into unnecessary meetings or taking calls around me. Also, I function best when I have a snack every two hours or so. At the office, I was too self-conscious to eat, so I spent hours trying to distract myself from my hunger instead of working. I inevitably did most of my “work”—making PowerPoints and fiddling with spreadsheets—in the evenings and over the weekends. After that summer, I absconded to graduate school and vowed to avoid any job that would require me to be in an office from nine to five for as long as possible.

During the pandemic, the glass high rises that struck terror into my young, impressionable heart stood empty, and for a while, people wondered whether offices were relics of the past. But over the past two years, companies have begun to call employees back into the office. Ontario public servants are expected to return to office full-time this month. Major banks, including the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD, and the Bank of Montreal, have asked employees to come in four days a week. These announcements followed on the tail of controversial RTO mandates at major companies in the United States, including Amazon, AT&T, and Goldman Sachs.

Unsurprisingly, employees are almost universally against RTO mandates. One 2024 study from the University of Pittsburgh found that 99 percent of companies that implemented them saw a drop in employee satisfaction. Part of the problem is that people are back to the commutes they avoided during the pandemic. In some cases, these commutes are longer than they used to be. As housing costs increased over the past few years, many people moved away from cities with the expectation that they could continue to work remotely.

Countless reports have also documented how RTO rules negatively impact women in particular. In places where day care is either unaffordable or unavailable, women typically shoulder the consequences. Many mothers choose lower-paying jobs that allow them to work from home so they can juggle child care at the same time. All this has likely contributed to another depressing fact: over the past two years, the gender pay gap has widened for the first time since the 1960s.

These mandates don’t really make sense for the employers either. Many companies are not equipped to handle the volume of people back in the office. The Globe and Mail recently reported that........

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