"Dell has allowed people to work remotely for over 10 years. But in February, it issued an RTO mandate, and come May 13, most workers will be classified as either totally remote or hybrid. Starting this month, hybrid workers have to go into a Dell office at least 39 days per quarter. Fully remote workers, meanwhile, are ineligible for promotion, Business Insider reported in March."
If we assume a quarter is 3 months, then there are 60 work days in a quarter. 39/60 is 65% in office. That basically means Dell employees have to be in office 4 out of 5 times a week with a little leeway here and there.
Great point. We are seeing new legislation, legal action, and guidelines set for the right to virtual schooling and healthcare recently, using ADA or procurement laws as the basis. Will be interesting if any explicit guidelines to protect the remote jobs of disabled people come about
I don't think promotion is a right of any kind - there are many jobs where that's it and you're never promoted. It would actually be ridiculous (though not unexpected for some places) to have laws related to promotion.
That said, it's really dumb corporate policy, it basically telling people to do the minimum or leave.
> It would actually be ridiculous (though not unexpected for some places) to have laws related to promotion.
The problem is that for many organizations, promotion is the only way your wage keeps up with inflation (without leaving, of course). Having a class of employees who get receive a different wage for the same work, particularly when that class aligns to a different set of demographics than in-office employees, is problematic at best, and I look forward to a court ruling it illegal. Promotion doesn't always mean a different job, sometimes it really just means different pay for the same job.
the goal may be to push out the old people but they're not going to be chasing promotion the way the Gen Z folks will.
paradoxically, the cat is out of the bag for Gen Z, and remote is seen as a given for them. it's a way to freeze the pay of the quiet-quitter remote types.
older (as in nearish to retirement) workers will accept what they have while remote until their out.
the mid-level folks in their late 20-40s will be most impacted, and I suspect the qualified ones will split instead of being frozen. that may be the goal, but it's also going to push out a crop of otherwise qualified folks that would be major drivers of future initiatives. like, a future director (currently manager) is going to accept this, sit on it for 3 years, and then jump to another org that will tolerate their remoteness.
there is a "prove your serious" angle by forcing them into the office, but I suspect that's only going to get mediocre talent who can't negotiate elsewhere for better bennies. or else "true believers" which generally mean suckers, in the Ribbonfarm-Clueless-Losers-Psychopaths sense.
The ADA requires reasonable accommodation, not whatever the employee demands. If you’re blind they can get you a screen reader, they don’t have to hire Tim Curry to read all the text you encounter during the day. And if you lack mobility they have to have a wheelchair accessible workplace, they don’t have to let you work from from orbit via radio uplink.
Given Dell's executives comments over the past decade on the effectiveness of remote workers, it seems like it would be difficult for them to make the case that remote work is not a reasonable accomodation for a disability affecting mobility.
Yeah this is unlikely to be included. It's probably more "if your contract is office based, we won't fire you for working remote but technically you're breaking your contract right now through inertia, so we can count that as a reason to not promote you."
Without other contributing circumstances (like being remote due to disability), this is legal in many countries with actual worker protections, let alone the US.
This is just tech workers being precious and cosplaying as being hard done by. Lmao.
