Safe spaces and empty offices

Given our more recent trips around the sun, social justice warriors patrolling professional workplaces may want to spend some time mulling over what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about justice.

Authentic justice, it states, is “the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor.” It continues: “Justice toward men disposes one to respect the rights of each and to establish in human relationships the harmony that promotes equity with regard to persons and to the common good. The just man, often mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures, is distinguished by habitual right thinking and the uprightness of his conduct toward his neighbor. ‘You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.’”

And then, it adds: “‘Masters treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing you also have a Master in heaven’” (CCC 1807).

Shortly after the Village People stopped singing “YMCA” on January 20, President Trump got to work signing a long list of executive orders, including one ending remote work for federal employees. His critics were quick to claim that the president represents the harsh leading edge of the return-to-the-office movement.

But even a cursory review of the facts reveals this is not true. Amazon began their efforts to move staffers back to the office in 2023 and has been trying very hard to enforce a five-day schedule. JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Dell and Boeing (among others) each have five-days-in-office policies. A much longer list of companies is enforcing a roughly three-day-per-week schedule. Of those, PWC—the global consulting giant—announced during Q4 2024 that in coordination with its return-to-work policy, it was laying off 1800 workers and installing tracking software on company devices to ensure staffers followed the firm’s order.

Whatever progressives think of these policies, Trump isn’t the pied piper here. In fact, some of their biggest donors are. The simple reason is that over the past fifteen years or so, social justice warriors have taken over boardrooms and c-suites and having employees work from the office has proven quite effective for inculcating these values. And executives aligned with a national party pushing free abortions and vasectomies at their presidential convention understood that allowing moms and dads more time with their families and single men and women more opportunity to contemplate the loneliness of their work-life choices was hardly a formula for organizational success. The work-from-home movement was not their idea; COVID sprung it on them. At the same time, company execs weren’t going to let a serious crisis go to waste.

A little history: in the years leading up to the pandemic, corporations had discovered a critical platform for rallying the troops. The 2010’s brought a wave of young employees into the workforce vocal about a perceived disconnect between their hopes and aspirations and the realities of corporate work. They demanded not just a good paycheck and a career but greater workplace meaning and purpose. At the time, the still-nascent “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) movement provided companies a vehicle for reassuring new professionals that work could fulfill these broader needs.

But after years focusing on product and service-centered green initiatives, execs realized that the ability of such projects to sustainably satiate was waning. By the early years of the first Trump administration, college campus cauldrons were bubbling over, popularizing victim and villain language for mass consumption. And so, with the restless natives seeking still greater workplace meaning, c-suitors pivoted to corporate culture. Through it, they would change society. CSR soon morphed into diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social and governance (ESG). The alphabet armies began their march.

By the end of the 2010s, Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi were household names. College presidents, business school deans and human resource teams were scurrying to hire consultants to organize lunchtime discussion series and enlist good corporate citizens to become “anti-racists”. Social justice warriors disavowed their privilege, called out microaggressions and created safe spaces. Of course, they were also motivated to move past the gender binary, become allies, and fight systemic oppression.

Those were amazing times but, as it turns out, they were making for some long days at the office. While Bob in accounting had always seemed to be a nice guy, more than a few co-workers were starting to wonder about him. His Pittsburgh Steelers coffee mug, coupled with his penchant for wearing “girl dad” t-shirts at company outings, seemed to reveal a disregard for the inherent nature of gender’s social construct and his implicit resistance to queer theory. Yes, there was that big client presentation due at the end of the week, but it was becoming clear that the more pressing question was: did HR know about Bob? Was he on their radar? See something, say something, they say. That client presentation could wait, but reporting a guy like that shouldn’t.

For some, COVID may have come to town just in time. Sending folks from their cubicles to their couches offered the only-slightly-left-leaning members of the corporate class a reprieve and a chance to do a cost/benefit on the cultural shift playing out in branch offices. But for the hardcore, committed true believers, work-from-home was a blessing in disguise; it was an opportunity to turn up the dial. As Mattias Desmet explains in his brilliant book entitled Psychology of Totalitarianism (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022), if professionals were looking for meaning before COVID, that need would be even greater when they were sitting at home during a pandemic feeling increasingly disconnected, depressed, and disheartened. And, as evidenced by the events of summer 2020, nothing would or should hold back the arc of history or suppress the urgent need to de-colonize society. For those in that group, the power structures of the traditional in-office workplace would always have both prevented corporations from fully and authentically embracing the marginalized and discouraged them from understanding the complexities of intersectionality. In fact, as remote modalities became the sole method of corporate communication during the pandemic, email signatures and Zoom name tags offered a new canvas to signal and enforce corporate virtue.

Crank up the pronouning; full throttle woke was on. A new age had begun.

For many of us, that period seemed as if it would last forever. But, behind the scenes, the data suggests that executive teams were discovering that corporate messianism was aging poorly.

A recent piece for Axios features a graph entitled “Mentions of “DEI” or “diversity, equity and inclusion” in quarterly earnings calls” from Q1 2020 through Q1 2024. While no perfect information exists about the inner workings of a company, earnings calls represent management’s communications with investors and analysts to keep them informed about the company’s overall financial health and operating activities. This graph shows a steep spike in DEI activity between 2020 and 2021, with it remaining relatively high into 2022 before dropping off precipitously at the end of 2022, reaching levels similar to those at the beginning of 2020 by the start of 2024.

In other words, analysis of approximately 9000 earnings calls reveals that DEI activity reached its zenith when everybody was working from home but dropped off significantly as companies were bringing people back to the office.

Pollsters probably do not find this surprising. Post-election Pew Research data indicates American workers’ views of DEI have grown more negative and a very recent Fox poll reveals that almost a full third of American voters say it is “extremely important” to end it.

And that brings us back to thinking about justice.

Blaming and defaming appear to have run its course. Corporations should have acted better, but they didn’t. And now they find themselves in an amusingly difficult situation. They pushed for safe spaces and are now struggling to fill empty offices.

What is it again that Scripture tells us about those who hunger and thirst for justice?

Catholic World Report