After several years of lenient telecommuting policies, Mayor Daniel Lurie’s order is an attempt to make the city more effective and responsive to residents.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has ordered city workers back to the office.
“Bringing our workers back to the office will make our services more effective and responsive to our residents,” Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, spokesperson for Mayor Lurie, told The Epoch Times in an email. “That is what San Franciscans expect and what Mayor Lurie will deliver. We look forward to working with our partners across the departments and in labor over the coming weeks to implement the mayor’s plan.”
Many city employees have enjoyed the option of telecommuting since July 2021, when then-mayor London Breed
signed an amendment to the Health Care Security Ordinance adapting the city’s telecommuting policy with the goal of reducing the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic. Telework likely began in earnest, however, on March 17, 2020, with the
shelter-in-place order.
Not all city workers have been working from home since the pandemic, as the Port of San Francisco began
welcoming all telecommuting employees back in November 2021, though the County of San Francisco Department of Human Resources (DHR) and SF Port at the time required all city workers to be vaccinated.
During his inaugural speech earlier this month, Lurie did not mention city workers but said he wanted to entice people to return to the downtown area.
“My job is not to demand that the private sector be back in the office every day. My job is to make you want to be downtown again for work—with your friends and with your family,” Lurie
said.
“This is truly a new era of cooperation and mutual respect between City Hall, the Board of Supervisors, law enforcement, and the thousands of city employees working on the front lines—without you we cannot carry out this vision for change.”
Telecommuting in both the private and public sectors has been a problem for the economic activity of downtown San Francisco, the city has said. According to
city data, nearly 470,000 people commuted into San Francisco every weekday prior to the COVID-19 lockdowns, drumming up significant economic activity for the downtown area.
Work-from-home reduced economic activity, hurting small businesses in the economic core. As recently as Feb. 5, San Francisco
lagged behind major cities such as Austin, Los Angeles, New York, and San Jose in office attendance. While 55 percent of New Yorkers work in the office, only 43 percent of workers in San Francisco commute to the office.
Lockdowns resulted in San Francisco office attendance dropping to less than 10 percent of what it had been prior. It began to slowly increase in the summer of 2021 and 2022. The reduction in the city’s in-person overall workforce led to significant economic losses for the city,
according to research by WFH Research Group.
Telecommuting had been
framed by the city as an opportunity to increase productivity, recruit and retain talent, save employees time due to not having to commute, and decrease the city’s carbon footprint.
A Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco report, however, found
little evidence of increased productivity due to telecommuting.
