The CEO of Starbucks can work remotely — but the baristas can’t. Why there’s unfairness at the centre of the hybrid work battle

Don’t be too hard on Brian Niccol, the new CEO of Starbucks.
Yes, it’s true that the recently-chosen head of the coffee giant will be able to work remotely, in a small office in Newport Beach, California. Sure, he’ll get paid a $1.6M salary, a $10M signing bonus, plus all the usual bonuses and options that come with a such a high profile job.
But, like us regular schlubs, he too will have to commute. When necessary, the California resident will hop in a private jet to make the 1,000-mile journey to Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. It sounds tough, but hopefully he can spring for some new headphones and find a good podcast to make his arduous journey more tolerable.
There are a couple of ironies in the CEO of a retail coffee chain working remotely. For one, while many CEOs have extolled the virtues of working in-person, in few situations is the need for at least some hands-on time more obvious than in high-volume food service.
For another, despite Starbucks being part of the reason cafe culture emerged in North America, the company has also been removing seats from many stores, converting them to grab-and-go locations. If the CEO is part of the remote work revolution, Starbucks’ coffee shops themselves are now less so.
Still, it bears stating the obvious: that Niccol can work remotely is being painted as a benefit or perk that was part of what drew him in. In so publicly extolling the virtues of remote work — even if implicitly — Starbucks has made clear what we already knew: almost everyone who is given the option wants to work remotely.
But many CEOs have come out quite firmly in opposition to remote work. Just recently, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that the reason Google has lagged its competitors in AI like OpenAI is because the company’s employees are working remotely (Schmidt walked back the comments after it was revealed that both companies have the same three day a week in-office policy).
Still, Schmidt’s comments are hardly unique. They only add to the chorus from many prominent figures critiquing remote work, whether the CEO of RBC, leadership at Dell, tech leaders like Sam Altman or Elon Musk, and a host of others.
Taken from the perspective of owners, the battle over remote work is about entitled employees vs practical, productivity-minded leaders. Remote work might be nice, the argument goes, but the real needs of business must win out.
But like most tension between workers and bosses, what appears to be idealism versus pragmatism is often a debate over what is actually pragmatic.
Consider what remote work actually allows people to do. For one, it means they can avoid a commute. Cities across the country are becoming ever more congested thanks to Canada’s reliance on the car and decades of underinvestment in transit. Given that commuting not only takes up significant amounts of time — around half an hour on average, but significantly more in cities — but also has deleterious effects on stress levels and mental health, that alone is an enormous boon.
But remote work can have other benefits too, whether increases in productivity or improved employee satisfaction and retention rates. There are social benefits too, with parents and other caregivers more easily able to be there for dependants, and also reducing the need for paid help or supervision.
Like all broad phenomenon, remote work isn’t simply either good or bad. As but one example, it can have a negative impact on the career advancement of women — perhaps an effect of gendered imbalances in child rearing work in couples who work remotely. 
Yet, as the example of the Starbucks CEO makes clear, remote work is at its heart about a better work-life balance. Spending more of one’s life around one’s loved ones, in comfortable surroundings, and with more freedom and flexibility as regards all the other aspects of one’s life is a clear benefit for many workers.
That’s why the remote work debate isn’t simply about a post-COVID trend, or some new form of entitled worker demands. It is instead about something more plain, obvious, and important: workers’ rights in the face of management. Just as unions and other activists in the past fought for weekends, paid and sick time off, or benefit plans, now remote and hybrid work are table stakes in talking about working conditions and employee satisfaction.
It is almost certain that while I am alive, the arrangement of exchange of labour for wages will remain a default and fundamental mechanism of economic activity.
But if COVID was an aberration or rupture, it allowed us to see and then experience a new way of working — and also perhaps consider a new way of thinking about work itself.