The pandemic gave Minnesota workers power. Now employers are taking it back.

The federal government job was hybrid when Sarah Reynolds accepted it, meaning she could live in Hudson, Wis,. and work in St. Paul.

But within months of her landing in the Midwest — Reynolds’ fourth cross-country move for work in less than a decade — the federal government had called its employees to the office.

“This was not what I signed up for,” said Reynolds, 42, who took a buyout amid the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) overhaul of federal agencies. “I had all this flexibility, and it got taken away from me.”

After the work-from-home days of the pandemic and the Great Resignation that followed, power that had shifted to workers has swung back to employers. Gone are the plentiful openings, hiring bonuses and flexible schedules. In their place: fake online postings, recruiters who ghost candidates and return-to-office mandates.

Major Minnesota employers, including the state, 3M, Medtronic, U.S. Bank, General Mills, UnitedHealth Group and Target, are calling at least some workers back to the office. National employers, from the federal government to Walmart, Amazon, JPMorgan and Disney, are doing the same.

“It’s hard to believe that five years ago, people were wondering if we were really ever going to go back to the office,” said Alan Benson, associate professor at the Carlson School of Management.

Coming out of the pandemic, he said, employees and employers seemed to agree that work-from-home was working. Workers were happy with the arrangement, and productivity was high.

More recently, though, executives have started to question success in areas that are harder to measure: acclimating new hires to company culture or coming up with innovative ideas. In other words, “watercooler stuff that you miss out on if you are trying to work hybrid or trying to work remote,” Benson said.

“I think that’s really what’s behind some of the big pitch to get people back to the office,” he said.

At the same time, rising unemployment has given employers more bargaining power.

The momentum shift began in 2022, when the labor market was hot and prices were high, said Aaron Sojourner, senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. The Federal Reserve started raising interest rates early that year to slow the economy and tame inflation.

The labor market has since cooled but stayed relatively strong, with unemployment hovering at 4% nationally and 3% in Minnesota. Still, economic uncertainty — particularly around President Donald Trump’s ever-evolving trade war — has many employers hitting pause on hiring, leaving people without jobs in limbo and people with jobs feeling stuck.

“It’s the pandemic and post-COVID and Zoom, but it’s also AI and just general uncertainty,” said Kristine West, an economics professor at St. Catherine University. “Maybe COVID was the accelerant that opened up the conversation, but now it’s also about some of these other big, tectonic shifts that we’re figuring out as we go.”

Worker power has declined to roughly where it was pre-pandemic, according to Sojourner’s Labor Leverage Ratio, which measures “quits” — or workers leaving jobs — against layoffs.

Return-to-office mandates, while “not as dramatic as hiring or laying somebody off,” Sojourner said, signal the change in power.

A worker called back to the office three years ago might have felt confident about quitting and finding another job, Sojourner said, but “right now, people definitely shouldn’t be that confident they can get another offer.

“They could try,” he said, “but I wouldn’t quit first. I would get the offer first.”

Jess Garcia, 28, started a fully remote marketing position while earning his undergraduate degree. Now at the tail end of a graduate program in Boulder, Colo., he’s looking for his next role and estimates he’s applied for several hundred jobs.

“I’m ready for the next step, but that next step is very challenging right now,” Garcia said.

Though the remote job has allowed Garcia to balance work and school, he’s open to other possibilities.

“I don’t really oppose going back to the office, because obviously, I want the next opportunity,” Garcia said. “If the next opportunity is in-person, I’ll definitely take it.”