The fast food giant McDonald's cut about 25,000 employees between 2017 and 2019. Forbes indicates another round of cuts is coming in an attempt to right-size—an awful word—a company that does more than 70 percent of its business internationally.

Walter Kirn of Compact flagged this excerpt from the piece:

The Chicago-based fast-food chain informed U.S. employees and some international staff last week that they should work from home from Monday through Wednesday to facilitate virtual delivery of staffing decisions. The company also asked employees to cancel all in-person meetings with vendors and outside parties at its headquarters during this time.

Let's stipulate that some of these employees deserve to get canned. What type of employer fires his subordinate over Zoom or the telephone?

A bad one, I think. And while a lot has been said about what remote work has done to employees' productivity, engagement, and ability to work collaboratively, less has been said about what remote work has done to employers and their relationship to those they employ. When you don't regularly face your workers, you can come to view them as cogs in a machine rather than human beings with families to support.

That's not a case against remote work, necessarily. There are benefits to it that the cult of Mammon refuses to acknowledge. But to the extent there are costs associated with remote work, those costs fall on both sides of the ledger, as McDonald's demonstrates.