Employers and employees have spent the past few years engaged in an arm-wrestling match of sorts over the return to offices. For a while, the odds were in workers’ favor. A white-hot labor market gave workers a lot of leverage, including the ability to dictate their own work-from-home schedule. The tides, however, are shifting. Employers are clawing back power, and some companies are using that power to compel workers back to their desks — or face some consequences.

If your company is doing layoffs, whether you work from home is probably not going to be the sole factor in deciding whether you get cut. But many large companies that have recently let people go have made it known that employees who, in the eyes of the higher-ups, exist mostly as faceless beings on a computer screen have a greater chance of getting a pink slip. The risk is a frustrating, if foreseeable, one for workers: out of sight, out of mind, out the door.

Executives at the online furniture retailer Wayfair told its staff in January that remote workers were likelier to be hit in its latest round of job cuts. IBM similarly warned its US managers they needed to start reporting to the office at least three days a week or leave. This month, Snap said its layoffs were meant to, in part, “promote in-person collaboration,” and Reuters reported the tech company’s cuts seemed to affect remote workers more than officegoers. Dell is telling workers it looks forward to seeing them around more, too.

This isn’t a brand-new development — big names, from Google to Amazon to Goldman Sachs, have been ratcheting up the return-to-office pressure for months. But we're in a moment where headlines about high-profile layoffs are basically a daily occurrence. Add in long-term trends, like the decline in loyalty between employers and employees, and it's no wonder remote workers feel anxious about cuts.

“It’s not too surprising,” Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School who has never been a big fan of remote work, said. “We might say it’s not fair, and they could both be true. There are lots of things that aren’t fair that nevertheless are predictable.”

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