New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced late last week that thousands of city workers will be allowed to work remotely two days a week, a change of heart from previous stances the mayor has taken on remote work. In an agreement between Mayor Adams and the city’s largest municipal union, city employees that can do their jobs remotely and have gotten satisfactory reviews will be allowed to work from home if they choose, starting in the next few weeks. The program will start with two agencies and will eventually be rolled out to more than 30 departments within the city. The turnaround from city officials may have to do with the fact that there are more than 20,000 unfilled city jobs in NYC. “Look, I’m a seven-day-a-week guy, and [what] I believe is not for everyone,” Adams said of the policy change. “I’m not so rigid that I’m not willing to sit down and figure out how do we reach the goals that we want.”
Battles between employers and employees over remote work continue to play out in cities across the country. Last week, Facebook parent company Meta became the latest major company to call workers back more days out of the week, requiring most of its employees to report to their local office three days a week starting in September. The move came a couple months after Meta announced another round of layoffs and CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked more workers to return to the office. Fellow big tech company Amazon is also clamping down on remote work. When the company’s policy requiring employees to come in three days a week kicked in last month, it led to some protests from employees. There is some shines that the remote work era is ending, the Labor Department recently released data showing that 72.5 percent of businesses said their workers rarely or never worked remotely in 2022.