Work Out

New Yorkers are saying it loud and clear, take this office and shove it.

The city’s office occupancy rate is at a pitiful 40 percent of what it was pre-pandemic.  

People prefer working from home, sitting at their IKEA workstations, logging endless hours on Zoom, never seeing a colleague in person,  never gossiping at the water cooler.

They fear commuting on the subway, avoiding eye contact with a potential slasher.  They despise darting around Penn Station mental patients and playing rat hopscotch on their walk to work.  

New York won’t survive as the world’s epicenter of brains and talent unless people put their high heels back on, tuck in their shirts and return to their cubicles.  

But it’s not looking good.

The Partnership for New York City is a business group and in the spring it surveyed more that 160 major employers.  Here’s what we have to look forward to after Labor Day:

• Just under half of Manhattan office workers are expected to actually be in the office on an average weekday.
• Only 9 percent are expected to be in the office five days a week.
• Among firms with more than 5,000 employees, only 42 percent are expected back in the office.

The Partnership also asked employers what would  encourage workers to return to the office and you probably won’t be shocked about what they said.  

More than half of the companies polled said more workers would leave their home office setups if there were fewer homeless and mentally ill people on the streets and if there were more police visible.

Wow, what a surprise!  People simply want to feel safe going to and from work. Kinda basic, don’t you think?

Our elected representatives succumbed to the mob and turned the safest big city in America into a dirty, dangerous dystopia.  

They cut the legs out from under the NYPD disbanding the highly successful anti-crime unit that got guns off the streets and saved lives.  

They vilified the constitutionally approved stop, question and frisk police tactic and sacrificed lives in the process.

They passed new laws that made our criminal justice system into a laughing stock.  Eric Adams’ words, not mine.

Their foolishness and fecklessness have ended New York’s golden era.  

There, I’ve said it.  New York will not be the what it once was for many years to come, if ever.

But, the pusillanimous politicians who’ve created chaos on our streets have been aided and abetted by the captains of corporate America.

Some of those CEO’s may now be waking up, like Google’s Sundar Pichai, who told an all-hands staff meeting recently that their productivity is lacking and he expects them to help the company meet new economic challenges.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, the king of employee coddling,  said in late July that he expects employees “to get more done with fewer resources.”

Maybe, as the Wall Street Journal writes, “the era of the kinder, gentler CEO is fading.  Corporate chiefs who spent much of the pandemic patiently answering questions in town halls, sending reassuring notes to staff members and projecting a softer image are shifting their tone and the economy is worsening.” 

Yup, nothing like a good ol’ recession and declining profits to kick a CEO in the ass.

But hey, Friend Without Benefits, you began this brilliant blog blaming politicians for the decline of New York’s business districts and now you’re bloviating about the lack of C-suite leadership.  What’s the connection? How are they related?

Here’s how.

Those same movements like defund the police, cashless bail and perpetrator pampering have piled onto a New York worker population already panicked by the Covid Industrial Complex.  

Corporations kowtowed to the lockdown loonies and allowed their employees to take advantage of their wavering and waffling.  They’ve stayed home far beyond any reasonable time frame and now, surprise surprise, it’s almost impossible to get them to come back.

Some of the biggest jellyfish were the big tech companies and now they’re staring a recession in the face and saying uh-oh, maybe profits really do matter more than aperitif afternoons and midday massages.

Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul can talk a blue streak about how important it is for workers to return to their offices.  Friend Without Benefits is here to tell you it ain’t gonna happen anytime soon until they fix the mess they and their brothers and sisters in stupidity have created above and under ground.

And as for you, corporate leaders?  Tell your employees it’s time to come back into the office.  Remind them that if they work hard and productively, they will succeed faster than their colleagues who are still at home in their sweats, waiting for that Fresh Direct delivery between Zooms. 

Do I think any of this is likely to happen?  It’s about as likely to happen as me winning the next billion dollar Mega Millions jackpot. 

But I continue to dream.