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September Reopening? More City Employers Postpone Their Return To The Office
By
Beth Fertig
and
Sean Carlson
Published Aug 7, 2021
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Enrico Della Pietra / Shutterstock
By
Beth Fertig
and
Sean Carlson
Published Aug 7, 2021
Share
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Back in the spring when vaccines became widely available, Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City business leaders were looking forward to a great reopening of offices in September. Some companies even started soft reopenings over the summer.
But if there’s one thing this pandemic has taught us, it's flexibility. Our expectations about returning to normal have been postponed many times over the last 17 months because the COVID pandemic is so unpredictable.
Plans are changing again now with the spread of the delta variant. As president and CEO of the Partnership For New York City, Kathryn Wylde has been holding constant conversations with the city's business community about when and how to reopen safely. She talked with WNYC’s Sean Carlson about how the delta variant is putting a damper on next month's reopening plans.
The following interview has been edited for clarity.
Carlson: Last month, your organization released a survey of city employers and it projected that 62% of workers would be back at their desks by September. Most of them for three days a week. But now we are hearing companies like Google and the New York Times are extending their work from home policies until at least October. Are lots of other companies doing that?
Wylde: Amazon just announced they're extending their work from home period ‘til 2022. And Amazon is now the second largest employer in New York City with 19,000 people. So, that's a big deal. I've spoken to a number of other companies—BlackRock, a major asset management firm; Accenture, a huge global consulting firm—all of their plans are being deferred. And they're going back to masking policies for vaccinated people, which is, again, a real downer in terms of getting people back to the office.
It sounds like most of these companies that you mentioned are white-collar office type jobs. Do you think the types of businesses that are most likely to delay the reopenings are businesses like that?
Well, there's combinations. For the office workers, the professional jobs, 80 to 90% of their people are vaccinated. And so they were really leading the charge back to work, but the businesses that are most affected are really the face-to-face retail, restaurants, small businesses that depend on a combination of foot traffic and also on tourism. And both of those phenomenon have been put into question.
The mayor of New York city announced that he's going to require that restaurants demand proof of vaccination from their customers, as an example. And this is a real reversal and something that imposes a real burden on restaurants, gyms, bars that are all affected by that order.
We reopened with enthusiasm on June 15th. Everybody was feeling confident of going into September with great momentum. And now we're beginning to find out what the new normal of living with pandemic on an indeterminate basis is going to feel like.
So, right now as you mentioned, about 66% of adults in New York city are fully vaccinated. Do you think more workers would feel more comfortable coming back if that rate was higher?
Absolutely. The higher the vaccination rate, the more confident we all are to be in public settings, whether it's the workplace or the subways or in a restaurant.
So last year when the vaccines became initially available and as they were rolled out and sufficient vaccines were produced, we wish there had been a federal mandate that everybody who is not immune compromised got vaccinated. And that would have set a tone that would have made it hopefully a lot easier. And that would have allowed us to avoid what we're seeing now, according to the health experts.
Do you think employers themselves could be doing more to get people vaccinated?
I think employers have done everything they feel is reasonable. About a quarter of the big employers have required vaccination if you're going to come back to the office, otherwise continue to work remotely.
They have provided incentives for vaccination. Like if you're not vaccinated, you can't do business travel. You can't go to clients' offices, you have to wear masks in the office. They had laid that out really since, since last spring, as a protocol to encourage everyone to get vaccinated. And I think professional businesses that worked with most people.
But there are a lot of people. I mean, in New York, we have almost half a million people who lost their jobs during COVID, they don't have an employer to mandate anything. And those tend to be communities where there's a lack of health education, a lack of trust in the healthcare system, and it's made it very difficult. The city's now offering a hundred bucks if you come in for your vaccination. So that's what we're reduced to.
Tagged
vaccination
COVID-19
pandemic
Kathryn Wylde
reopening
Beth Fertig
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Sean Carlson
Before coming to New York Public Radio, Sean worked in print, online and radio news around the mid-Atlantic region and Alaska. A New Jersey native, he holds a B.A. from the New School University in Greenwich Village and an M.A. from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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