

The break room at the distribution center smells like industrial cleaner and burnt coffee. It's 5:47 on a Tuesday, and Marcus Delano is finishing his third shift as a warehouse selector. He's heard the news stories about the remote work debate—the return-to-office fights at tech companies, the think pieces about hybrid schedules. He has thoughts.

"They're fighting over who has to sit in a chair," he says, not looking up from his phone. "Both sides act like the chair is the problem."

This observation, offered without malice in a fluorescent-lit room where the overhead lights hum at a frequency designed to keep workers awake, captures something that gets lost in the endless discourse about the future of work. The debate over remote versus office has consumed business pages, podcast episodes, and management conferences for years now. But it remains, fundamentally, an argument between two groups of people who have the same thing: jobs that could theoretically be done from anywhere, if technology and corporate policy allowed it. The discourse treats this as a universal question—when "everyone" debates remote work—but the word everyone excludes roughly two-thirds of the American workforce. The majority of workers in this country cannot work from home because their jobs require physical presence: building things, moving things, caring for people, serving customers face-to-face. They don't have a side in this argument because they were never invited to the negotiation.

Delano is thirty-four, married with two kids, and has worked at this facility for six years. He selects roughly four hundred items per hour, pushing a cart through aisles organized by alphanumeric code, his phone tracking a daily step count that hovers around fifteen thousand. The remote-work debate, he suggests, is strange because both sides seem to agree on something: that work should be a matter of choice, that the ability to work remotely is a kind of freedom worth fighting for. What's odd, he says, is that neither side seems to notice they're arguing about the same thing—a desk, a chair, the question of where a person sits—while the larger question of what work should mean goes untouched.

He finishes his coffee. The shift change begins in thirteen minutes, and the floor needs prepped for overnight orders. He has never worked from home. His father was a plumber. His sister is a nursing aide at the hospital across town. None of them have been asked about their preferred work arrangement, because the question does not apply to labor that cannot be digitized.

This is what gets obscured in the remote-work debate: it is a conversation between two bubbles, and everyone else is just trying to get through the day.