Flexport CEO calls remote work ‘white-collar fraud’
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of $8 billion logistics company Flexport, called remote work ‘white-collar fraud’ on a podcast this week — and said the idea that it benefits highly paid employees is “a total fantasy,” Business Insider reports.
Petersen says remote work cost Flexport its culture and has now banned it
“I made the mistake during COVID of going remote and letting it stay remote for way too long and I think our culture suffered,” said Petersen.
“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,” Petersen added.
Flexport now requires employees to work in the office five days a week — a reversal of its pandemic-era model, which coincided with revenue growing from $670 million to $3.3 billion by 2021.
The pushback: the data on worker preferences runs the other way
“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,” said Ryan Carson, CEO of Untangle.
Remote workdays now account for 26% of fully paid workdays in the United States — down from a peak of 62% in May 2020 and up from 7% before the pandemic.
More than half of workers say they prefer at least some remote days, and approximately 33% say they prefer fully remote arrangements.
Petersen joins Amazon’s Andy Jassy, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, and other high-profile CEOs who have imposed mandatory in-office schedules in 2025 and 2026, framing full office attendance as a cultural and productivity imperative.
The gap between executive mandates and worker preference is growing: CEOs are installing five-day in-office requirements at an accelerating pace while workforce data consistently shows the majority of employees want at least some flexible arrangement preserved.
For BPO and offshore staffing providers, the RTO debate is directly relevant to talent strategy. Distributed, remote-capable delivery is a structural competitive advantage for BPO — not a policy concession — and the pool of workers pushed out by full in-office mandates is a recruitment opportunity that providers should actively pursue.
The BPO firms that make flexibility a deliberate value proposition, rather than a default, will attract the talent that domestic employers are pushing back to desks.
