(Image: City of Seattle)
Most of the 14,000 City of Seattle employees will be required to work onsite at least three days a week starting in November under a new “return to office” mandate from Mayor Bruce Harrell.
“As a city and an employer, we strive to provide the best services to our residents, to build a great office culture for our employees, and to learn the best lessons from the pandemic and modern organizational behavior – and that includes recognizing the benefits of in-person teamwork,” Harrell said in a statement.
The new rule will increase the in-office requirement by a day.
The Harrell administration boasts that Seattle City Hall was “one of the first major employers to bring employees back to the office at least two days per week in 2022 as the pandemic receded.” Seattle says over 65% of city employees “regularly reported to their worksite throughout the pandemic to perform essential non-remote functions.”
King County and Sound Transit said they are also boosting return to office efforts.
The change will follow a similar mandate this spring from Sara Nelson as the Seattle City Council president ordered staff to work from City Hall four days a week.
While the mayor spoke to the advantages of collaboration in having workers back in the office more often, there are also massive economic implications behind the hopes that more employers will follow suit. The city’s tax base has suffered continued losses from the large amount of empty office spaces in downtown Seattle.
In Philadelphia, the back to office effort went through a summer court battle but city workers are now required to work in-person five days a week.
Meanwhile, many employers have embraced the efficiency and employee satisfaction that can come with a more virtual approach to work including savings on office leases and other costs around maintaining a physical presence in cities across America.
The new City of Seattle rules come as around 7,000 city workers are enjoying raises after a new contract was forged with the 16 different labor unions representing the group.
At Seattle City Hall, the new return to office rules will begin November 4th.
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Finally.
Perfect timing. Washington State is experiencing a very high rate of COVID infections from new variants and is expected to grow. This comes from current waste water analysis which is all the monitoring that’s left.
COVID is endemic now, the pandemic is over.
Sara and Bruce, can they get any more out of touch? And what changed in the past year that an extra day is now necessary? And if it’s so necessary that their butts are downtown instead of remote, why aren’t they compensating their employees for commuting in?
Best case, they’re seen as aging, boomers who are going to die on the sword of “this is how we’ve always done it, why should we change for the better?” Kind of similar to the weird anti-remote work policy the GOP took on post-COVID, which boiled down to the fact that their corporate overlords don’t want their workers to be happy and have more freedom.
Worst case, they’re requiring their employees to spend own personal time and money, uncompensated, to further their political agenda with the Downtown Seattle Association. Seems like the FEC and Dept of Labor need to investigate these two.
Either way, not a good look for a pro-labor city like Seattle. These “pro-business” clowns will be gone in a year and a half, can’t wait!
“Labor” has to be on site. This is white collar folks, being asked to come to work by their constituents.
Go look up labor in the dictionary.
I didn’t ask office City workers to return to the office, I’d rather they be happy and productive wherever they are comfortable working.
Not sure why some people are so concerned where worker’s butts are when they are working. Weird fetish perhaps?
Who has ever been compensated for commuting? With the exception of hires since 2020, these employees took jobs expecting to be in-office 5 days/wk. I guess the new hires who started during work-from-home could be annoyed, but I’m sure they were told WFH was temporary…
Times have changed. When a job is no longer required to in any particular location, but a manager is asking the employee to nonetheless use their personal time and money to unnecessarily go someplace, that’s a legitimate case for compensation.
Just because our labor laws are based in the 1950s when manufacturing dominated the labor scene, doesn’t mean they can’t change.
Better call this one a wahmbulance. He might just pass out from all that hyperbole.
Compensation for commuting to work? Never heard of it. Not being required to be at your workplace? For some it worked but many businesses are experiencing negative effects from remote work and more and more are bringing people back to the office. Corporate bosses aren’t overlords, they are the people giving job opportunities and providing payment for work and thus get to set the rules. If anyone doesn’t like the rules they are free to find work elsewhere. Since more and more businesses are requiring workers to return it looks bad for the city and county to not be bringing their people back to the workplace and in turn generating revenue for many downtown small businesses etc. It’s basic 101 how an economy works and in this case a micro economy.
Pro-labor doesn’t mean you get to slack at home and not serving Seattle residents and tax payers.
Seattle has annual budget of 8 billion and doesn’t achieve much… a big reason is inefficiency and bloatness of the government.
If you or anyone who doesn’t like a job that requires you to go to office, feel free to quit and find greener pastures.
Hi there, Seattle worker here! Sounds like you’re the anti-government type that hates the government no matter what for reasons only you know and your mind won’t be changed. However, you make some points that I feel should be addressed.
First, I’ll start by saying that the Mayor’s announcement to City workers on Monday was not the first time he’s announced it. His first time announcing it wasn’t even to City leadership and workers. It was to a venture capitalist’s summer picnic on Thursday! How’s that for respecting workers?
Pro-labor doesn’t mean you get to slack at home and not serving Seattle residents and tax payers.
Seattle workers have actually been very productive at home, in most cases more productive than they were in the offices. The two day policy wasn’t ideal, but it allowed people to come in as often as they wanted if they weren’t productive at home.
The Mayor and Council President are both very well aware that their workers were more productive and happy at home. However, the new order isn’t about productivity and never was, otherwise we would have been required to go three days or more from the beginning.
Seattle has annual budget of 8 billion and doesn’t achieve much… a big reason is inefficiency and bloatness of the government.
Various City departments are in various phases of floor consolidation. Quick math would show that 2 days a week means you can stagger your office employees and eliminate up to half of our floor space!
The Mayor’s announcement on Monday was a shock to leadership and employees. Now leadership is scrambling to undo all the consolidation at great cost, because three days does not allow for any consolidation.
The consolidation would have saved tens of millions of dollars per year. The City rents a lot of private office space downtown, from the same people who belong to the downtown business associations that have pressured the Mayor into doing this. Remember that when your taxes and utility rates increase over the next few years.
If you or anyone who doesn’t like a job that requires you to go to office, feel free to quit and find greener pastures.
After the Mayor previously announced the two day minimum, a lot of employees did just that. A bunch of workers quit, retired or moved to other work places that offered more flexible working conditions. Unfortunately, it was mostly good and knowledgeable workers that left.
The City had vacancy rates above 25% for a long time. Work still needed to get done and the vacancies were (and still are being) filled with consultants, at the cost of 3x to 10x the wages of an equivalent City worker. We’ve slowly been backfilling positions, but it’s difficult to attract talent with unnecessary, mandatory in-office requirements. There’s a lot of good talent among the new hires, but it will take years to decades to rebuild the experience lost when Bruce implemented the previous two day minimum.
Of course, this doesn’t even touch upon the fact that the Mayor jerked us around for a new contract to the point of striking. It’s no secret that he is the son of two City workers. What we struggle to comprehend is why he feels he can treat his workers with disrespect.
Hmmm…So you are saying this is about control. I agree.
This is about supporting businesses downtown and sending a message to others outside of the govt. that we are cracking the whip, so should you. Time to go back to “office culture” “Team building” and other BS reasons for wanting control of peoples lives.
A few hundred City employees buying $7 sandwiches does not a downtown revival make.
Other companies are going to do what’s best for business and their employees, not emulate some one term mayor.
Bruce and his “pro-business” council have no plans or ideas on how to revive downtown. This is a last gasp by Bruce to appeal to his true constituents: the downtown business association AKA property owners.
Control of people’s lives? You meant to say work life I imagine. Being required to go to the office isn’t a big deal. So many people in the world would give anything to have such a trivial problem.
As a person trying to do business with the City almost daily, it’s very difficult to communicate with those departments who aren’t meaningfully in the office a few days a week. Nearly impossible to get staff on the phone, they work strange hours and resist collaborative meetings that used to be the norm. Anything related to construction and development under SDCI, SCL, SDOT, SPU should have regular office hours and re-open the walk-in service desk. The lack of service by staff comes at a high cost to small businesses like mine. Thanks Bruce & Sara!
The SDCI walk-in service desk has been re-opened at the Municipal Tower for months now FYI.
I work with SDCI all the time from their remote locations. If anything it is faster service. No more driving downtown, paying for parking, then waiting in a long line to speak to someone about my projects. I don’t understand how smelling someone’s breath in person while they provide you with the same information they would remotely better anything?
Bruce and the magical worker-purchased sandwiches that will save downtown.
City workers aren’t even in the downtown core, if anything they will be purchasing parking that they can’t afford.
btw there are no “raises” at the City, just COL increases – Seattle metro COL increased 23% in the last three years, the City COL increase didn’t come close to that for anyone but SPD
I’ve seen the salaries on the employment website: They’re not too bad compared to the private sector. Even some of us in the private sector don’t get much in way of salary increases that keep up with inflation. Plus, the city can give you some semblance of a pension. I’d be cool with three days in the office, particularly if I could take public transportation instead of driving.
No raises? Maybe for non-represented classes. The Coalition of City Unions and Seattle just recently agreed to raise base pay rates for dozens of class specifications. Join a union or go to a coalition meeting some time to be better informed.
Business first! Gotta keep that campaign money flowing.