• Don't want to go back to the office? Prepare to lose your job.

• That's the message from bosses in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

• The push to get workers back to offices could put millions of jobs at risk if people don't comply.

It's starting to look like the cruelest summer for millions of workers as they either reluctantly wave goodbye to sunny freedom — or risk incurring the wrath of their managers.

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, employers are preparing to be unforgiving, mean-spirited, and downright vindictive with any workers planning on getting in the way of their great return-to-office crackdown, which looks set to culminate just after Labor Day.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, millions of white-collar Americans have come to expect remote work as a given in their working lives. They operate on the basis that employers trust they'll get their work done in their own space while juggling childcare, errands, and the odd lunchtime workout.

Sure, more workers have started to return to offices in some capacity, but that has not been the result of severe compulsion or because remote work has fallen out of favor.

In fact, a monthly survey conducted by Stanford University, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the ITAM University in Mexico found US residents enjoyed more than 30% of their paid full days at home in July, signaling the persistence of remote work more than three years after the pandemic started.

But it seems like employers have had enough.

New mandates to get workers back into the office are becoming more aggressive in the face of an economic downturn that has rattled CEOs grappling with high interest rates, the threat of AI, a growing tilt towards protectionism, and more.

Failure to comply with these mandates now seems to mean one thing: getting fired. In other words, the return-to-office drive is about to enter its perilous endgame.

Return-to-office ultimatums are here

Take a look at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. Last week, it emerged that Meta was making its return-to-office rules harsher after Lori Goler, head of human resources, told employees who are "assigned to an office" that they would need to work in an office three days a week.