The ownership/management class sees Return To Office as a symbolic fight over class power. Who has the power, the worker class or the ownership class?
It has nothing to do with real hard numbers, efficiency, or really anything to do with rational choices at all. It has everything to do with the politics of who is considered to have the power in the modern workplace. The workers or the boss?
The ownership class knows how much they are stealing from the worker class so they really don't want workers to start realizing how much agency and power they really do have if they work together as a class...
I think everybody needs to keep the conversation on forced RTO focused on this. Yes there are arguments that forced RTO is about commercial real estate property values and I am sure there is truth to that but we really need to see this story for the simple, broad collective story it is; we are in a class war, the rich know it and that is exactly why they don't want to give in to the extremely reasonable accommodations of allowing workers to do their jobs remotely.
All they care about is the message it sends if they agree to worker demands, everything else including the reasonableness of the demands is noise to the people with the power and money.