Re: It may be a security issue.
"Ultimately, it is their company, not yours."
There is, however, a matter of public interest here*. We have spent decades building a system in which businesses are compressed into cities and require workers to commute into them. The commuting radius of a large city may cover a few thousand square miles. Those commutes have an environmental cost. In practice the city governments who are trying to meet those costs do so by trying to beat up the commuters. In the UK wie have the Low Emission Zones - London is on and Sheffield has joined in. As it happens it was two news reports from Sheffield that put me onto this many years ago. One was from someone whose job was to bring businesses into the city, jubilant at signing up another big employer. The second was someone responsible for roads complaining about the ever increasing traffic. Clearly they'd not got together to look at what mattered to Sheffield as a whole.
I've heard the arguments that congregating businesses into cities boosts efficiency by improving communications. That argument stretches back into the medieval (I have a recently purchased history book right beside me making that argument amongst others). It wasn't an absolute argument then - the weavers of York and Beverley ran into problems when the West Riding weavers became a serious collective competitor - and I suspect it's not an absolute argument now. Now we have tools that can enable dispersed work forces to collaborate. As I've said before, if it's possible to build an entire OS by dispersed work what serious argument can there be that something less complicated needs to bring everyone together under one office roof?
Working at home obviously doesn't suite every role. Factory work is obviously one for which it doesn't work and, as a sometime lab. scientist, I know lab. work is another. I've read that some landlords of buildings that were, until recently, tenanted by financial businesses are now trying to attract bioscience businesses; they at least have worked out where office work is likely to head in the long run.
But returning to the public interest - what should be the public response, or at least the response of governments which are supposed to look to the public good? They should be adopting policies that discourage the centripetal forces that make businesses congregate in this way. Raising taxes on arrangements that require commuting would be one way. Encouraging the conversion of city centre property to residential would be another so that as to minimise the loss of property values that have been one argument against WFH and also enabling commuting free options for city centre work.
Another would be to look again at history - those rural West Riding weavers eventually ended up working in mills but still close to home as they had no option but to walk work. Currently there are a couple of mill sites quite near which have been, as so often happens, been granted planning permission for housing as brownfield sites. With the closure of almost all the mills this has become commuter country, ill-served by public transport,** dependent on commuting by car and at the same time with much old housing unable to provide home EV| charging to support future commuting needs. Planning policy needs to be reversed so those brownfield sites can become workplaces again, either for single businesses or shared between multiple businesses.
* As a retiree that happens to be my sole interest now.
** Even if it were returned to the levels of the 1950s it s wouldn't suffice, we are between several conurbations so that huv-and-spoke public transport wouldn't work. This village and many others like it are, in their own right, hubs with multiple spokes.
