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Starbucks Showdown in Boston Points to New Phase of Union Campaign

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The company moved to contain the labor push after it took off nationally. Now, with strikes and other tactics, organizers seek to regain momentum.For much of the summer, employees reliably turned up at a Starbucks near Boston University. But instead of going inside to serve coffee, they sat outside in lawn chairs — as part of a strike over what they said was retaliation for unionizing.When passers-by inquired how long the strike would last, workers responded, “As long as it has to.” Ultimately, they shut the store for more than two months, until satisfied that Starbucks would not impose new scheduling requirements in union stores that they said would force some of them to quit. Starbucks said it had told union stores for weeks that there would be no such change and denied retaliating against union supporters.The walkout was one of dozens at unionized Starbucks locations in recent months, meant partly to re-energize a labor organizing effort whose momentum has stalled since the spring and has so far yielded no contract.When workers at three Buffalo-area locations filed for union elections in August 2021, it appeared to catch the company off guard. The campaign spread rapidly, unionizing roughly 250 stores.But election filings dropped from about 70 in March to under 10 in August, ushering in a second phase of the campaign: an uneasy stalemate in which organizers struggled to sign up new stores even as the company was hard-pressed to reverse their gains.“In the context of the size of the organization as a whole, it’s a drop in the bucket,” said David Pryzbylski, a partner at the management-side firm Barnes & Thornburg, alluding to the company’s 9,000 corporate-owned locations. But he added: “Anyone who thinks it’s going back anywhere close to zero is foolish. It’s safe to assume they’ll have at least hundreds of cafes unionized going forward.”That has led to a third phase of the campaign, in which the union, Workers United, has stepped up efforts to win concessions from the company through collective bargaining, which is scheduled for the coming weeks.Some of the concessions sought by the union, like a commitment by the company to stay neutral in future elections, could make it easier for workers to unionize. Others, like paid leave tied to a pandemic, which the company has discontinued, could encourage more workers to join the union by showing it can deliver concrete benefits.But to win such concessions and greatly expand the union’s reach, labor experts say, supporters will almost certainly have to increase pressure on the company, through strikes or other means. And that has heightened the importance of a number of cities — in addition to Boston and Buffalo, places like Eugene, Ore.; Albany, N.Y.; and Ann Arbor, Mich. — where there are several unionized stores, dozens of workers willing to coordinate their actions and a community that is largely sympathetic.“Massing forces in a particular geographic region and attempting to spread the conflagration there has the potential to work,” said Peter Olney, a former organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. “I would focus on those metro areas.”One architect of the union’s strategy in Boston is a recent law school graduate named Kylah Clay, who works as a barista at a unionized store.On a blistering afternoon in August, Ms. Clay, wearing a tank top and green army pants, sat outside the Boston University store holding a stack of checks that workers came to collect, courtesy of the union’s Starbucks strike fund.In between, she recalled how she and a colleague had recently ambushed their district manager at another store after he had become slow to respond to their calls and text messages. “We went up to the district manager and started making our demands,” Ms. Clay said. As Ms. Clay tells it, she knew almost nothing about unions before last year, when company officials began pouring into Buffalo after the campaign had gone public. Among them was Howard Schultz, who was between tours as chief executive. “When Buffalo filed, Howard should have kept his mouth shut,” she said. “I would have never gotten involved.”Employees at her store, where she had first worked during law school, and another Boston-area store filed for union elections in December and won their votes in April. Since then, more than 15 stores in New England have also unionized, most of them with her help. Nationwide, the union has won about 250 out of just over 300 votes.But adding to the total has become more difficult. “Stores that are easy to organize, that had people in them who were natural leaders, who were excited about it — those have filed already,” said Brick Zurek, a former Starbucks employee in Chicago who helped organize workers there.Adjustments in the way that Starbucks treats workers have also appeared to play a role. During the early phase of the union campaign, the company generally did not fire workers involved in organizing. But this year, Starbucks began to do so more regularly — like when it fired seven workers in Memphis who were recently reinstated by a federal judge.The National Labor Relations Board issued multiple complaints against Starbucks for firing union supporters, and the agency’s judges have ruled against the company in a few cases so far.Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, denied that the company had unlawfully forced out workers, saying any increase in disciplinary action against union supporters reflected an increase in violations.In May, the company announced wage increases and new benefits, like faster sick leave accrual, that would apply only to employees of nonunion stores or those not in the process of organizing.Kylah Clay, a recent law school graduate, works at a unionized Starbucks in Boston, and she leads a committee that has helped other stores in New England organize.Tony Luong for The New York TimesJulie Langevin, a worker involved in organizing a Starbucks store near Boston that voted against the union, said several longtime employees in her store relied on Starbucks for health care and had become alarmed that unionized workers might miss out on benefits.“They were extremely concerned that they would actually lose health insurance,” Ms. Langevin said.The labor board has issued a complaint against the company for withholding new benefits and wage increases from unionized employees. Starbucks has said it is forbidden by federal law from adding certain benefits unilaterally in unionized stores.Workers United is an established union with more than 70,000 members across the United States and Canada, but has often relied on Starbucks workers to organize their own stores and plan their own labor actions.Ms. Clay leads a committee that helps New England stores organize, sending out union “starter kits” that include Starbucks Workers United T-shirts and union cards with envelopes addressed to the labor relations board. “I have one closet with 300 shirts in it,” she said in August.She also leads the region’s collective action committee, which came about after workers at a Boston-area store staged a daylong strike over a leaky roof in late May. (Starbucks said the leak had been repaired within a business day.)Six weeks later, as the committee was contemplating a series of daylong walkouts in response to the company’s withholding of new benefits from union stores, workers at the store near Boston University decided to strike. Spencer Costigan and Nora Rossi, two union leaders at the store, which is at 874 Commonwealth Avenue, said workers were fed up with what they described as retaliation for unionizing and the company’s refusal to bargain.“They texted me out of the blue and said, ‘I think we’re ready to do it,’” Ms. Clay said. “Not as many stores were interested at the time. But then they saw 874 and were like, ‘Ah, OK.’” Workers eventually waged strikes that closed five stores for one week; the strike at 874 Commonwealth sprawled across nine weeks.The actions seemed to build support for their cause. The Boston City Council passed a resolution backing the strikers, and politicians, activists, students and other union members joined the picket line at all hours of the day and night.Ms. Clay also leads the region’s collective action committee.Tony Luong for The New York TimesWorkers at the Boston University store called off the strike in late September, a few days after Starbucks posted an announcement to baristas saying stores that had unionized by early July would not be subject to a requirement that workers be available to work at least 18 hours a week. (The requirement would take effect at nonunion stores.)Ms. Rossi said that, before the workers went on strike in mid-July, their manager had pressured some union supporters to increase their availability under the new rule or leave their jobs. Other unionized workers in Massachusetts made similar complaints on a messaging app as recently as early September.Mr. Borges, the Starbucks spokesman, said the rule had never applied to union stores, citing communications to managers in July and a tweet by the Starbucks union the same month. He emphasized that the company had not negotiated with the striking workers or offered them concessions.A few days after the strike ended, Starbucks began sending letters to worker representatives at unionized stores proposing a window for bargaining in October. The union’s president, Lynne Fox, had sought to bargain on a regional or national scale as the union prepared proposals with input from thousands of workers, but the union has accepted the store-by-store approach preferred by the company. Starbucks has nonetheless continued to portray the union as resistant to store-level bargaining.The outcome of the negotiations could reverberate beyond Starbucks. In an email that Geico sent to employees in August, after some workers there began union organizing, the company emphasized that Starbucks had recently offered wage and benefit increases only to nonunion stores. Other large employers are surely watching closely as well.Ms. Clay, for one, believes the stakes are high enough that she has altered her career plans, declining a job in the local public defender’s office so she can stay at Starbucks and push for a contract.“There was some grieving to it — I spent the last five years trying to do that job,” she said. “But you have to go where the wind takes you.” More

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    Can Progress on Diversity Be Union-Made?

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    Staring at the wall of glass clawing its way up the unfinished facade of the Winthrop Center in downtown Boston — 53 floors of commercial and residential space soaring 690 feet — Travis Watson isn’t interested in the grandeur of the thing. He wants to know who’s working on it.“It doesn’t pass the eye test,” he scoffs: In a city whose non-Hispanic white population has dwindled to 45 percent, it’s hard to see Black and brown faces on the site.He has more than his eyesight to go by. In 2018, Mayor Martin J. Walsh — now President Biden’s labor secretary — appointed Mr. Watson to lead the Boston Employment Commission, the body created to monitor compliance with the Boston Residents Jobs Policy. The policy mandates giving a minimum share of work to city residents, women and people of color on large private construction projects and those that are publicly funded.The latest version of the ordinance, from 2017, requires that Asian, Black and Latino workers get at least 40 percent of the work hours on sanctioned projects to better reflect the city’s demographics. (It also mandates that 51 percent of the hours go to city residents and 12 percent to women.) Mr. Watson complains that while many projects fail to meet the benchmarks, nobody is penalized.When the commission reviewed the Winthrop Center project in mid-September, when it was roughly halfway done, only 32 percent of the hours worked had gone to people of color. Other downtown projects have similar shortfalls. In September, even a project to renovate City Hall — the building where the targets were written and the Employment Commission meets — was shy of the mark.“We should be going higher,” Mr. Watson said. “This is a floor.”Boston is one of the nation’s most solidly Democratic cities. It just elected Michelle Wu, an outspoken progressive, as mayor by a resounding margin. She campaigned heavily on a promise to expand opportunities for minority businesses and to empower workers and communities of color with the sort of policy proposals that led to the creation of the Employment Commission — proposals aimed at ensuring that lucrative opportunities are fairly distributed. But the projects underway in Boston show how much harder it is to deliver on goals of racial equity than to set them.In Boston and beyond, building is one of the last American industries offering good jobs to workers without a college degree. The prospect of trillions of dollars of new federal funding for infrastructure projects under Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better program is raising hopes that roads, bridges, railways, wind farms, electric grids and water mains could provide millions of good construction jobs for a generation or more.What infuriates Mr. Watson is that, as he views it, unions for the building trades are the main impediment keeping people of color from building sites. He recalls one of his appearances before Boston’s City Council: “A councilor got up to say this is a union city,” he said. “For me, he was saying this is a white city, a city for white workers.”This tension has opened an uncomfortable rift between elements of the nation’s traditional Democratic coalition. Prominent advocates of racial equity push for Black and Hispanic contractors, whose operations are often small and nonunion but hire a lot of workers of color.Unions push back against the charges, sometimes forcefully, arguing that the growing number of apprentices of color indicates an embrace of diversity. In the first three months of this year, for example, nearly 30 percent of apprentices across the building trades in Massachusetts were nonwhite, up from 24 percent six years earlier.The unions also contend that nonunion contractors and their allies are cynically using a discussion of racial diversity to exploit workers.“The most vocal critics of our vigorous, intentional and ongoing efforts to improve our diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are often directly employed, funded, or formally aligned with nonunion special interest groups,” Renee Dozier, business agent of a Boston area local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said in a statement. Many critics, she added, “have a direct profit motive to see wage and safety conditions watered down in one of America’s most dangerous industries, construction.”Mr. Watson shrugs off such criticism.The 38-year-old son of a white mother and a Black father, a graduate of Brandeis University with a major in African and African American studies, Mr. Watson is a former community organizer in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Roxbury and North Dorchester, south of downtown.He is employed as a director of racial equity and community engagement at the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation, a nonprofit group that offers financing for affordable housing and other community projects.He is deeply frustrated by what he views as the naked discrimination barring Black and Latino workers from the high-paying construction jobs that offer a path into the middle class. He is exasperated that unions generally won’t disclose the racial and ethnic mix of the workers in their halls — aside from apprentices, which they are obliged to report — and suggests that it is because the numbers would show their lack of diversity.He also grew frustrated by the inability of the Employment Commission to do anything about all this. As the law stands, he noted, contractors must only go through the motions to prove they are making an honest effort to comply.By last month, he had had enough. He resigned.Travis Watson, who resigned as the head of the Boston Employment Commission, views unions as the primary obstacle keeping people of color from building sites.The Pipeline IssueUnions for the building trades — laborers and electricians, plumbers and metalworkers — are largely to thank for ensuring that construction work is a middle-class job. The unions have bargained successfully for decent wages, and for health and pension benefits. They train workers and monitor safety conditions on building sites.Gatekeeping is also one of their functions, particularly in a union-friendly city like Boston. Unions run apprenticeships, which confer and certify the requisite skills, controlling the pipeline of workers into the profession.Who gets a job at downtown projects like the Winthrop Center or the City Hall renovation, where large unionized contractors and subcontractors do a vast majority of the work, is often decided in the union hall, which handles calls from contractors and makes assignments from a list of out-of-work journeymen and women.City data suggests that workers of color got 38 percent of the hours on projects subject to the ordinance last year. This year, between April and September, the share actually hit the target of 40 percent, it said. But there’s a stark difference in the jobs that whites and nonwhites get: Minority workers in 2020 did 76 percent of the work removing asbestos, where the mandated base wage set for projects like the City Hall renovation is usually around $40 an hour. By contrast, they got only 22 percent of the plumber hours, which pay around $60.“The pipeline issue is a real one, and I do think there’s a lack of diversity in the pipeline,” said Celina Barrios-Millner, the chief of equity and inclusion in Boston’s departing city government. “Any time you see outcomes that are so skewed, you have to understand there is discrimination somewhere down the line.”Some union officials acknowledge the issue. When the City Hall project came up for discussion at the Boston Employment Commission in May, Commissioner Charles Cofield, an organizer for the North Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters, which covers New York and New England, argued that “the main part of the pressure needs to go to the people supplying the manpower.” That means the business agents at the union locals.Elmer Castillo, an immigrant from Honduras who rose to be vice president of Local 723 of the carpenters’ union for a couple of years, has long experience with the ways of the building trades unions. “Unions are good if you know how to work with them,” he said. But equality of opportunity between white and minority workers? Mr. Castillo says, “That doesn’t exist.”Workers are supposed to be selected for a job based largely on how long they’ve been unemployed. But nepotism rules in the union hall, Mr. Castillo contends. Business agents trade favors with contractors. They will place their sons, cousins and nephews in the good jobs, and they will make sure that those sons, cousins and nephews follow them up the union ranks.“This builds a chain that never ends, a chain of whites,” Mr. Castillo said. “One will never have the opportunity to achieve what they achieve.”Craig Ransom, now the business manager at Local 346 of the carpenters’ union, offers his career as an example of the glass ceiling Black workers face. After rising to business manager at Local 723, he got stuck — blocked from what he says would be his natural progression to regional manager. “Unions are good for people that look like me,” Mr. Ransom said. “But at the very top level, there is no one that looks like me.”The conflict between white insiders and Black or Hispanic outsiders clamoring for an opportunity has bedeviled unions since the dawn of the labor movement. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended officially sanctioned discrimination, race often trumped class solidarity. Many unions discriminated against workers of color, and many employers turned to workers of color to cross union picket lines.A few years later, President Richard M. Nixon leaned into the conflict between unions and African Americans, embracing the so-called Philadelphia Plan, which required federal contractors to prove they were hiring minority workers to match the ethnic composition of the area where work was being done. It would create “a political dilemma for the labor union leaders and civil rights groups,” said John Ehrlichman, a Nixon adviser, driving a wedge between two pillars of Democratic politics.“Unions are good for people that look like me,” said Craig Ransom, the business manager at Local 346 of the carpenters’ union. “But at the very top level, there is no one that looks like me.”Labor unions have come a long way since then. One reason is that far more workers of color are in the labor force, and many unions want to organize them, including the Service Employees International Union and UNITE HERE, which covers leisure and hospitality workers.The other reason is that organized labor doesn’t have the clout it once had. “The old bastions of exclusion with strong seniority systems that favored white workers have been decimated,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian of labor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported fewer than 100 racial-discrimination complaints against unions, about one-third the number brought a decade before. “They don’t have the power they used to have in being involved in hiring,” said Gwendolyn Young Reams, the commission’s acting general counsel.Unions in the building trades remain something of an exception. They are strong, compared with other unions, and retain control over training and hiring, especially in public projects and the large, more heavily regulated construction in union-friendly urban areas. Nearly 13 percent of construction workers are unionized, about double the overall rate across private industries.‘Driving the Ship’Maven Construction is not a union contractor. It is an open shop, meaning it has not signed a deal to employ only union workers. Its founder and chief executive, JocCole Burton, a Black woman, knows that limits the kind of work she can do. But she also understands the cost of signing up with the unions.“Every single college or university in the region, every hospital and all public work requires union labor,” said Ms. Burton, who founded Maven in Atlanta and moved it to Boston four years ago. “Anything that is downtown and most work in the Boston metro is going to require union labor.”The exception is affordable-housing projects, which bring in nonunion contractors to keep costs down, Ms. Burton said. Still, open-shop contractors are mostly limited to smaller projects. “The largest project we’ve done is $35 million,” she said, with jobs worth $5 million to $10 million more typical.She is seeking to make Maven a “signatory” contractor, to have a shot at more lucrative work. But the arrangement is expensive: The benefits and other obligations add up, and they are hard to afford if you don’t have a steady stream of big projects.More problematic for Ms. Burton is that she expects unions to provide few workers of color. “The unions are in the business of making sure that the union halls get all the work, but they don’t have enough Black and brown bodies in their halls,” she said.Ms. Burton says she is shocked by what she sees as overt discrimination in such a liberal city. “The racism experienced 50 years ago in Atlanta is the same we see in Boston today,” she said. “It’s subtle — not as overt — but it is the same.” A crucial problem, she argues, “is the unions are driving the ship when it comes to equity.”Union officials contend that much of the criticism is unfair. A report from Local 103 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers noted that while people of color made up only 4 percent of retired electricians drawing a pension in the last five years, they accounted for almost 30 percent of their apprentices, a testament to how much it has evolved.“There is no denying that unions in many industries, including construction, just like corporations in many industries, have a troubling past when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Ms. Dozier, the business agent for Local 103. “But we are doing more every day to increase the diversity of our membership than almost any other industry — and frankly, it is unethical of the nonunion lobbyists and their mouthpieces to try and turn that important work into an excuse to further their own exploitative practices.”The site of the City Hall renovation project. In Boston and beyond, building is one of the last American industries offering good jobs to workers without a college degree. Mark Erlich, who retired in 2017 as executive secretary-treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters and is now a research fellow with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, argues that construction unions have become more welcoming to nonwhites in the last few decades.Mr. Erlich is one of the authors of a book addressing the history of racial exclusion in the building trades. He notes that the original Boston Residents Jobs Policy in 1983 came out of the fight by Black workers for jobs on building sites. But it had to include residents and women to gain white political support and overcome the opposition of union leadership.“There is a legacy of racism, which by no means has been eliminated,” Mr. Erlich said. “I respect folks in the community that complain that things are not changing fast enough. And they are not changing fast enough.” Still, he argues, unions realize that “they need to become less homogeneous and reflect the demographics of the city.”And he warns that the nonunion contractors that will hire workers of color do not generally provide training or a career path, as unions do. The work is often more dangerous, he says, and it pays nothing like the wages in union shops.The Limits of PatienceWorkers of color who make it into the unions acknowledge the opportunities that membership provides. On a sunny October afternoon in Dorchester, a roomful of apprentices and journeymen and women, assembled by Local 103 to talk to a reporter, lauded the union’s efforts to broaden its ranks and called for patience.“Diversity doesn’t happen overnight,” said Sam Quaratiello, a recent graduate of the apprenticeship program who is of Asian descent. Walter Cowhan, a Black journeyman, argued that the union had become far more diverse in his 20 years of experience. Still, he said, if workers of color are to become more prominent on job sites, training is essential. “If you don’t prepare the work force, directly bringing in Black and brown workers could undermine the whole process,” he said.But among some of those pushing for racial equity, patience is wearing thin. Mr. Watson offered the words of the Black author and activist James Baldwin: “You’ve always told me it takes time,” Mr. Baldwin said in the 1989 documentary “The Price of a Ticket.” “How much time do you want, for your progress?”The building unions are “huge obstacles” to that progress, said Angela Williams-Mitchell, who heads the Boston Jobs Coalition, a community organization dedicated to increasing opportunities for people of color. “They do not open their doors to create access for communities that have historically been excluded.”If they are so committed to diversity, she says, why do unions refuse to provide data on the share of minority journeymen and women, even as they disclose the racial and ethnic breakdown of apprentices? “Break it down for us so we know what needs to be done,” she urges.Unions remain essential to maintain construction’s track record of lifting workers up, Mr. Erlich says. He recalls one of Mr. Watson’s heroes, the late Chuck Turner, a community activist who fought to increase Black employment in the building trades. “He was the ultimate radical — his attitude was, let’s drive the unions into the sea,” Mr. Erlich said. “But he came around to the position that without unions, construction would become a low-wage job.”Mr. Watson, in fact, agrees. “Unions are great,” he said. “But they have to give us an opportunity.” More

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    Companies Put Return-to-Work Plans in Motion

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerBuildings in Manhattan, where the amount of sublet office space available to rent surged nearly 50 percent last year.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesReturn-to-Office Plans Are Set in Motion, but Virus Uncertainty RemainsMany employers are not making a decision until many workers are vaccinated. And some are making plans for “hybrid” work arrangements.Buildings in Manhattan, where the amount of sublet office space available to rent surged nearly 50 percent last year.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyJulie Creswell, Gillian Friedman and March 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETA year and a pandemic ago, over 100,000 people filled the central business district in Charlotte, N.C., pouring out of offices, including several recently built skyscrapers, and into restaurants, bars and sports venues. Then as the coronavirus sent employees to their homes, much of the city center quickly went quiet and dark.The return of those employees to their offices has been halting and difficult. Last fall, Fifth Third Bank began bringing back workers, but soon reversed course. LendingTree, which is moving from the suburbs to the city, is waiting for the end of the school year. Wells Fargo has delayed its return to the office several times, telling its employees recently that they will continue to work remotely through at least May 1. And Duke Energy will bring some employees back in June, and most of the 6,000 people at its headquarters in September, when children should be able to go back to schools.Corporate executives around the country are wrestling with how to reopen offices as the pandemic starts to loosen its grip. Businesses — and many employees — are eager to return to some kind of normal work life, going back to the office, grabbing lunch at their favorite restaurant or stopping for drinks after work. But the world has changed, and many managers and workers alike acknowledge that there are advantages to remote work.While coronavirus cases are declining and vaccinations are rising, many companies have not committed to a time and strategy for bringing employees back. The most important variable, many executives said, is how long it will take for most employees to be vaccinated.Another major consideration revolves around the children of workers. Companies say they can’t make firm decisions until they know when local schools will reopen for in-person learning.Then there is a larger question: Does it make sense to go back to the way things were before the pandemic given that people have become accustomed to the rhythms of remote work?“Everyone has different comfort levels with coming back,” said Chuck McShane, a senior vice president at the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, an organization that has helped lure businesses to the area. “For some companies, it depends on the type of work you’re doing and whether you can remain at home. But a concern about continued remote work is, how do entry-level workers get socialized into the office culture?”About a quarter of employees across the country are going into offices these days, according to Kastle Systems, an office security firm that gets data from 3,600 buildings in the United States.Many companies, paying to rent empty office space, are eager for that number to rise. Their executives believe having employees working side by side improves collaboration, supports the development of younger employees and nurtures the heart and soul of any company — its culture.A mass return to the office would help revive the economies of city centers that have been ghost towns for months.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesA lone pedestrian in Midtown Manhattan. The number of workers returning to the office remains below 20 percent in New York.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesThat’s why some managers like Mark Rose, chief executive of Avison Young, a commercial property consulting and property management firm based in Chicago with offices around the world, is asking employees to return to the office in April.“You’re not going to be fired or written up if you don’t come back, but it is the expectation that, subject to local laws, and subject to your individual issues, that you start to make your way back,” Mr. Rose said about his 5,000 employees. “It absolutely is going to be an expectation.”A mass return to the office would, of course, be a boon for commercial real estate companies like Avison Young. Landlords, whose revenues are under threat as corporations move out or reduce the amount of space they rent, would breathe a sigh of relief. Many tenants have more space than they need. In Manhattan, the amount of sublet office space available to rent surged nearly 50 percent last year and it is currently 27 percent of all available space, the highest share since the period right after the 2008 financial crisis, according to Savills.Moreover, a return to the office would help revive city centers that have been ghost towns for months. Restaurants and bars could start hiring again and returning commuters could generate much-needed revenue for struggling transit systems.The course of the pandemic has largely dictated office attendance. That number crashed in March and April last year as the pandemic took hold and started slowly rising in the late spring, according to Kastle. Another surge in infections after Thanksgiving drove occupancy down but it appears to be on an upswing.There are big regional differences. In large cities in Texas, more than a third of workers are back, while the New York, San Francisco and Chicago areas remain below 20 percent.[embedded content]Some of these regional differences might be explained by how people get to work. “In places where people are commuting through public transportation, we know that makes people much more vulnerable to Covid because of the sheer presence of others, compared to if you’re commuting in your own car,” said Tsedal Neeley, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    H. Jack Geiger, Doctor Who Fought Social Ills, Dies at 95

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyH. Jack Geiger, Doctor Who Fought Social Ills, Dies at 95He used medicine to take on poverty, racism and the threat of nuclear destruction. Two groups he helped start won Nobel Peace Prizes.Dr. H. Jack Geiger in 2012. He believed doctors should use their expertise and moral authority to improve conditions like poverty, hunger, discrimination, joblessness and lack of education.Credit…Angel Franco/The New York TimesDec. 28, 2020, 3:17 p.m. ETDr. H. Jack Geiger, who ran away to Harlem as a teenager and emerged a lifelong civil rights activist, helping to bring medical care and services to impoverished regions and to start two antiwar doctors groups that shared in Nobel Peace Prizes, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 95.His death was confirmed by David Shadrack Smith, his stepson.Dr. Geiger was a leading proponent of “social medicine,” the idea that doctors should use their expertise and moral authority not just to treat illness but also to change the conditions that made people sick in the first place: poverty, hunger, discrimination, joblessness and lack of education.“Jack redefined what it meant to be a physician,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and the co-founder of the Children’s Health Fund. He added, by email, “He felt it was our right and responsibility as doctors to ‘treat’ hunger, poverty and disparities in health care, as directly and openly as we treat pneumonia or appendicitis.”The social order, not medical services, determines health, Dr. Geiger said in “Out in the Rural,” a short documentary film made in 1970 about the first community health center in Mississippi. “I’ve never seen any use in what I call the Schweitzer bit,” he added, referring to the humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, “which is the idea that you stand around in whatever circumstances laying hands on people in the traditional medical way, waiting until they’re sick, curing them and then sending them back unchanged into an environment that overwhelmingly determines that they’re going to get sick.”In the 1960s, Dr. Geiger was a co-founder, with Dr. Count Gibson, of community health centers in South Boston and in Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. They provided desperately needed health care but also food, sanitation, education, jobs and social services — what Dr. Geiger called “a road out” of poverty. The centers inspired a national network of clinics that now number more than 1,300 and serve about 28 million low-income patients at more than 9,000 sites.“I don’t know if some of the Mississippi white power structure cares about dead Black babies or not,” Dr. Geiger said in the film, about the first center in Mississippi. “But if they don’t, even they can’t afford to say so publicly. We have been able to enter and to do things under the general umbrella of health that would have been much harder to do if we’d said we were here for economic development or for social change per se.”Dr. Geiger, second from left, treating a baby in Bolivar County, Miss., where he co-founded a community health center.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionDr. Geiger was a founding member of two advocacy groups, Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to end the nuclear arms race, and Physicians for Human Rights, which shared the 1997 prize for working to ban land mines.He rallied doctors in the Cold War era to speak out against what he saw as a myth being promoted by the government, that nuclear war could be survivable. On the contrary, he insisted, hospitals would be quickly overwhelmed, and even victims with treatable injuries would perish.Drawing physicians out of the clinic and into the political fray “was a really signal event,” said Dr. Robert Gould, a pathologist in San Francisco and president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.In an email for this obituary sent in 2012, Dr. Geiger said he was driven in part by an outrage over injustice.“I’ve been angry,” he wrote, “seeing terribly burned children in Iraq after the first Gulf war, or interviewing torture victims in the West Bank, or listening to Newt Gingrich say ghetto kids should learn to be part-time janitors and clean toilets (in another country, they called that Bantu Education). So anger doesn’t vanish, but is replaced by a determination to do something.”Home Was a Way StationHerman J. Geiger was born on Nov. 11, 1925, in Manhattan. (It was unclear what the J. stood for, but he was mostly called Jack throughout his life.) His father, Jacob, born in Vienna, was a physician; his mother, Virginia (Loewenstein) Geiger, who came from a village in central Germany, was a microbiologist. Both parents, who were Jewish, had emigrated to the United States as children. Mr. Geiger grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and their home was often a way station for relatives fleeing the Nazis.“The last to appear were some cousins from my mother’s birthplace, Kirtorf,” Dr. Geiger said in the email. “When they got their visas to come to the U.S., they said, the Nazi authorities were furious. On the night before their departure, the authorities ordered all their neighbors to go out at twilight and stone their house. The neighbors all dutifully gathered — and threw loaves of bread instead.”That story, Dr. Geiger said, taught him not to stereotype.He skipped so many grades in the city’s public schools that he graduated from Townsend Harris High School (then in Manhattan, now in Queens) at 14. Too young to start college, he learned typing and shorthand and went to work as a copy boy for The New York Times. He also began hanging out at jazz joints, listening to Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Fats Waller. His parents were often beside themselves, waiting up for him and sometimes even calling the bars to ask if “Jackie” was there.Jack soon ran away from home and turned up, suitcase in hand, in Harlem’s Sugar Hill section on the doorstep of Canada Lee, a Black actor whom he had seen on Broadway and had gotten to know after talking his way backstage. Mr. Lee, once a teenage runaway himself, let young Jack sleep on the couch — after consulting with his parents — and though Jack sometimes returned home, he spent most of the next year in Harlem. The year was 1940, and Mr. Lee’s home was a hub for writers, actors and musicians — Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, Billy Strayhorn, William Saroyan. The Black guests told harrowing stories of racism, and Harlem was seething over the mistreatment of Black troops at military bases in the South. Jack Geiger took it all in.In 1941, with a loan from Mr. Lee, he began studying at the University of Wisconsin. He worked nights at a newspaper, The Madison Capitol Times. Because Madison had a curfew for anyone under 18, he said, “I am probably the only police reporter in history who had to get a special pass to be out at night.”In 1943, after meeting James Farmer, the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, Mr. Geiger started a chapter of the group in Madison. It was the height of World War II, and after turning 18 that year he left school to enlist in the merchant marine, which he chose because it was not racially segregated.When Dr. Geiger arrived in the all-Black Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou in the 1960s, he found conditions there as desperate as those he had seen in the poorest areas of South Africa.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionRabble Rouser for JusticeDischarged in 1947, Dr. Geiger enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of Chicago. He discovered racial discrimination there — Black patients being excluded from certain hospitals, qualified Black students being rejected by the medical school. He fought the policies for three years and ultimately helped organize a 1,000-strong faculty and student protest strike — an activity virtually unheard of in that era.He paid a price for his rabble-rousing. The American Medical Association wrote to medical schools warning of his “extracurricular activities.” No school would take him. He had, in effect, been blackballed.Dr. Geiger went back to journalism for the next five years, as a science and medicine editor for the International News Service (later part of United Press International). It was, he said, “a gorgeous education” that let him read journals, attend conferences, interview researchers and, significantly, meet deans whom he could lobby to let him into medical school. In 1954, at 29, he was admitted to what is now Case Western Reserve University’s medical school in Cleveland.During his last year at Case Western, he traveled to South Africa and worked with two physicians who were setting up a health center in an impoverished, disease-ridden region of the country called Pholela, which was then a Zulu reserve. A key to the center’s success was that local people — its own patients — worked there and helped run it.For five months Dr. Geiger took care of patients, visiting thatch huts and cattle kraals, meeting traditional healers and seeing the huge improvements — pit latrines, vegetable gardens, children’s feeding programs — that the health center had brought to the region.“I learned a little Zulu, including the three oral clicks in that language, which always made me drool, to the hilarity of my African teachers,” he wrote in a chapter he contributed to the 2013 book “Comrades in Health.”Dr. Geiger’s time in Africa made him want a career in international health. He trained in internal medicine at Boston City Hospital and in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.In the “freedom summer” of 1964, he traveled to Mississippi to help care for the civil rights workers who were pouring into the Deep South to campaign for voting rights. The next year, he organized medical care for the people who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.“I took a long look around,” Dr. Geiger recalled of his first visit to Mississippi. He saw conditions much like those in South Africa: families living in shacks with no clean drinking water, toilets or sewers; sky-high rates of malnutrition, illness, infant death and illiteracy; few or no opportunities for residents to better themselves and escape. He did not have to travel to Africa to find people in trouble, he realized.Mound Bayou in the 1960s. Dr. Geiger originally traveled to Mississippi in 1964 to treat civil rights workers and realized he could do more.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionA Clinic in Mound BayouUnder President Lyndon B. Johnson, the war on poverty had begun, and the Office of Economic Opportunity had been created to pay for projects to help the poor. Sponsored by Tufts University and armed with grants from the opportunity office, Dr. Geiger, Dr. Gibson, Dr. John Hatch and others set up a health center in Mound Bayou, Miss., a poor, Black small town where most people were former cotton sharecroppers whose way of life had been wiped out by mechanization.The center was a copy of the Pholela project. The clinic, which opened in 1967, treated the sick but also used its grant money to dig wells and privies and set up a library, farm cooperative, office of education, high-school equivalency program and other social services.The clinic “prescribed” food for families with malnourished children — to be purchased from Black-owned groceries — and the bills were paid out of the center’s pharmacy budget.The governor complained, and a federal official was sent to Mound Bayou to scold Dr. Geiger for misusing pharmacy funds, which, the official said, were meant to cover drugs to treat disease.“Yeah,” Dr. Geiger replied, “well, the last time I looked in my medical textbooks, they said the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”The official, he said, “shut up and went back to Washington.”Dr. Geiger in 1966 with Dr. John Hatch during construction of a community health center in Mound Bayou, Miss. They, along with Dr. Gibson, secured government grants and a sponsorship from Tufts University to bring more social services to the area.Credit…Jack Geiger, via Associated PressDr. Geiger helped found Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1961. The group argued that official predictions of the effects of nuclear war minimized the number of casualties and the extent of the destruction it would cause. At the group’s public meetings, Dr. Geiger’s job was “the bombing run” — offering a detailed account of what a one-megaton nuclear bomb would do to the city in which the meeting was being held.He had a resonant voice and a crisp, forceful delivery. His presentations left audiences stunned, according to a colleague in the group, Dr. Ira Helfand.Dr. Geiger was a co-author of one of the first articles to look at the medical costs of nuclear war. The article, in The New England Journal of Medicine, predicted the fate of Boston in a nuclear strike — 2 million dead, a half-million injured and fewer than 10,000 hospital beds left in the entire state of Massachusetts. Doctors must “explore a new area of preventive medicine, the prevention of thermonuclear war,” the article said.It was published in May 1962 — five months before the Cuban missile crisis, which took the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.Dr. Geiger’s marriage in 1951 to Mary Battle, an administrator and executive assistant in health care, ended in divorce in 1968. They had no children. (Ms. Battle died in a car accident in 1977.) In 1982, he married Nicole Schupf, a neuroscientist, epidemiologist and professor at Columbia University.In addition to his wife and his stepson, Mr. Smith, Mr. Geiger is survived by two stepgrandsons. An older sister, Ruth Ann, a schoolteacher, died in 1986.In 1978, Dr. Geiger became a professor of community medicine at the City University of New York Medical School at City College of New York.In his final years, which were marked by bladder cancer, lung cancer and blindness from glaucoma, he continued to write book chapters, articles and editorials and to give talks.To the end he was an impassioned advocate for civil rights. In an essay published in 2016 by Physicians for Human Rights, he called for more action to fight the lead-poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Mich., and to hold accountable the officials responsible for it.With characteristic bluntness, he ascribed the contamination to “a contemptuous disregard for the health of people of color, especially if they are poor.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More