To a greater extent than de Blasio ever did, Adams has pinned the city’s economic recovery from COVID-19 on workers returning to office buildings – particularly in Manhattan – and has said that the municipal workforce should be “leading the charge.” “I’m trying to fill up office buildings and I’m telling J.P. “They trust that we’re adults and we can meet all our deadlines and do our work if we’re not in the office,” Cedeño said of his new employer. Jeremiah Cedeño, the co-founder of City Workers for Justice, recently left his job at the Human Resources Administration to work at a mental health nonprofit that offered flexibility to work from home. “The two-and-a-half hours a day that I lose to a commute, that adds up.” “The pension is nice, but I have a life to live now,” the city employee said. Several employees City & State has spoken to have considered leaving city service in search of jobs that offer more flexible work policies, despite the benefits of municipal work, including the fulfillment of public service. But that bill hasn’t advanced, and the odds of it passing with one day left in the state legislative session are low. That’s partly why City Workers for Justice – a group of current and former city employees fighting for remote work – pushed for Albany to pass a bill that would allow city workers who are able to perform all or some of their work remotely to work from home. But while employees who spoke to City & State said they hoped their unions would fight for a remote work policy, they acknowledged that it could come at the cost of other priorities at the negotiating table, such as protecting health benefits or getting cost-of-living raises. Though employees at different agencies report that the enforcement of the in-office work policy can vary based on the agency and manager, they said there generally has not been extra leeway granted to work from home during the current surge – or during surges earlier this year or in 2021.ĭistrict Council 37, the city’s largest public employee union, recently sent a survey to members asking about their priorities, and one option included telework. We’ve got a better understanding of long COVID, although still imperfect.” “We’re facing increasingly transmissible variants with increased vaccine escape. “The pandemic is still a thing,” the worker said. The employee added that their frustration with the policy had only grown since the most recent COVID-19 surge in the city accelerated over the past few weeks – and is starting to go down. I’m too tired to be really angry about it anymore,” said a city employee, who asked not to be identified in order to speak openly. “I’ve been beating this drum long enough. Several city employees who aired their frustrations about the in-office work policy to City & State earlier this year said today that they’re starting to lose hope that the policy will change, despite some indication that municipal unions might prioritize fighting for a telework policy in upcoming contract negotiations. (Adams did say in a Q&A with the press on Wednesday that “there’s going to come a time we may say that one day a week we may do some type of different version,” appearing to suggest some openness to a partially remote schedule at some point in the future.) Though that policy started under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Adams has continued it and has shown no signs of relaxing it anytime soon, despite what some city workers called a crisis of morale and staff shortages. Those employees gradually returned to the office in the spring of 2021 and then were required to work in person full-time by that September. While a large swath of city workers – including uniformed and public-facing employees – have been working in-person throughout the pandemic, many office-based public servants were able to work from home through 2020 and part of 2021, when COVID-19 tore rapidly through the city and vaccines weren’t widely yet available. “Please note, the Mayor has repeatedly emphasized, for the City to continue its comeback, we need employees from every sector to return to their offices,” Carone wrote. In an email to agency heads, the mayor’s chief of staff Frank Carone urged the higher-ups to continue to enforce the in-person work policy, Politico New York reported. New York City Mayor Eric Adams isn’t backing down on the city’s mandatory return-to-office policy for municipal employees.
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