Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen called remote work ‘white-collar fraud’ — then said it’s really for workers who’ll accept lower pay

Regarding remote work, he says, “I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old. The idea that I could do any work at my house is like a total fantasy,” he said. “Like, come on. You’re kidding.” And if it doesn’t work in his house, he figures it works nowhere: “I have a bigger house than most employees do ... there’s no work getting done at that house when the children are around.”

But the part that really affects paychecks isn’t about kids. It’s about who he thinks remote work should be for instead.

Who Petersen thinks remote work is for

Petersen said going remote during the pandemic was a mistake. “I made the mistake during COVID of going remote and letting it stay remote for way too long and I think our culture suffered as a result,” he said. Flexport now brings people in five days a week, and he suggested workers who wouldn’t come back were let go.

Even with all the return-to-office headlines, not everyone is back. In May, about 26% of U.S. paid workdays were still done from home, down from a 2020 peak near 62% but still far above the roughly 7% from 2019, according to a survey from WFH Research, the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes.

Petersen also talked about pay. Petersen said remote work mostly makes sense for highly skilled workers in developing countries who can use it to earn more than their local market pays. For everyone else, he said, ”the idea that work from home is going to benefit highly paid employees is sort of a total fantasy.”

Not everyone took it well. “As someone who has raised an 18-year-old and a 15-year-old, the precious time you get to see them while you’re working from home will be worth more than anything you could do with your company or the dollars that you can make,” Ryan Carson, CEO of legal-software company Untangle, wrote on X.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, is on the same side as Petersen, who has been just as blunt about wanting people back in the office. Other executives, though, like Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, have said office-only hiring can make companies miss out on hiring the best talent.

Why the pay angle matters

A skilled worker in a developing country will often work a remote job for less than a U.S. employee in the same seat. That’s the economic reason offshoring exists, and remote tools make it easier than ever.

Some research shows that highly paid workers do place significant value on remote work. Highly paid workers clearly benefit from remote work, because they’ll pay for it. In a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, economists who tracked the actual job offers U.S. tech workers accepted and turned down found that the average tech worker would give up 25% of their pay for a partly or fully remote role over a fully in-person one. That’s not what people trade away for something worthless.

What your flexibility is worth

If you work remotely or hybrid, flexibility is likely worth something. Tech workers in the NBER study valued their flexibility at about a quarter (25%) of their pay. So a job that pays $5,000 less but lets you stay home is not automatically the worse deal. And if a remote job pays the same as an in-office one, that flexibility is extra pay.

Petersen’s point about overseas workers is worth keeping in mind, too. The jobs most at risk are the simple ones, the kind anyone with a laptop can do. What protects you is the part of your job that’s harder to copy: your relationships, your judgment and being there when it matters.