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    Starbucks fires Memphis workers involved in unionization efforts.

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    Starbucks on Tuesday fired seven employees in Memphis who were seeking to unionize their store, one of several dozen nationwide where workers have filed for union elections since December.A Starbucks spokesman said the employees had violated company safety and security policies. The union seeking to organize the store accused Starbucks of retaliating against the workers for their labor activities.The firings relate at least in part to an interview that workers conducted at the store with a local media outlet.Reggie Borges, a company spokesman, said in an email that Starbucks fired the workers after an investigation revealed violations. He cited a photograph on Twitter showing that store employees had allowed media representatives inside the store to conduct interviews, in which some of the employees were unmasked and which he said had taken place after hours. “That is a clear policy violation, not to mention the lack of masks,” Mr. Borges wrote.Among the violations, Mr. Borges said, were opening a locked door at their store; remaining inside the store without authorization after it had closed; allowing other unauthorized individuals inside the store after it had closed; and allowing unauthorized individuals in parts of the store where access is typically restricted.He also wrote that one employee had opened a store safe when the employee was not authorized to do so and that another employee had failed to step in to prevent this violation.Two of the terminated employees said that some of the supposed violations were common practices at the store and that employees were not previously disciplined over them. They said, for example, that off-duty employees frequently went to the back of the store to check their schedules, which are posted there. Mr. Borges said that this was uncommon when a store is closed.One of the former workers, Beto Sanchez, said he was the employee accused of opening a store safe without authorization. He said that as a shift supervisor, he was normally authorized to open the safe and that he had done so to help a colleague on the evening of the media interview, when he was not on duty. He wondered why he had been fired over the violation rather than disciplined some other way.In a statement, Starbucks Workers United, the union that represents workers at two stores in Buffalo and that is helping to unionize Starbucks workers across the country, said, “Starbucks chose to selectively enforce policies that have not previously been consistently enforced as a pretext to fire union leaders.”The union said on Twitter that the company was “repeating history by retaliating against unionizing workers.”A judge for the National Labor Relations Board found last year that Starbucks in 2019 and 2020 had unlawfully disciplined and fired two employees seeking to unionize a store in Philadelphia. Starbucks has appealed the ruling.A petition filed with the labor board seeking a union vote at the store says 20 employees there would be eligible for membership.Wilma Liebman, who headed the labor board under President Barack Obama, said that to prove that the firings constituted unjust retaliation, the board’s general counsel would have to show that the workers were engaged in union activity and that the union activity played a “substantial or motivating” role in the decision to fire them.One question in resolving the latter issue is whether Starbucks typically fires employees, whom it refers to as partners, over similar infractions.Mr. Borges, the spokesman, wrote: “We absolutely fire partners who let unauthorized people or partners in the store after hours and/or violate policies like letting others handle cash in the safe when not authorized to do so. This is a common, understood policy by partners as it brings an element of safety and security risk that crosses a number of lines.”He did not immediately provide data on the number of employees fired for such violations in a typical year. More

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    What Social Trends Told Us About the American Economy in 2021

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    If 2020 was the year that made Zoom a verb and imbued the phrase “online dating” with new meaning, 2021 was its annoying younger sibling. Things were not quite as novel and scary as the darkest early days of the pandemic and initial state and local lockdowns, but the year found new and creative ways to be bad.Shutdowns weren’t nearly as widespread, but continued waves of coronavirus infection caused factories to shutter and people to retrench from economic life. This was a year in which the Duke of Hastings replaced the Tiger King as a national obsession, vaccine cards became a passport to semi-normal life, and the internet lost its hive mind over America’s cream cheese shortage.Social trends like those can tell us a lot about the economy we’re living in. To wrap up 2021, we ran down what some of the big cultural moments and movements taught us about the labor market, economic growth and the outlook for 2022.The Everything ShortageSadly, it wasn’t just the schmear that ran out this year. Many, many things came up short in 2021. For a while, people tried to blame the fact that they couldn’t get hold of a couch or a used car on a ship stuck in the Suez Canal, but society eventually came around to the reality that we’ve all been buying so much stuff that we have collectively broken the supply chain.Government stimulus checks and savings amassed over long months at home have been fueling strong consumer spending, and the virus has shifted spending patterns away from services like restaurant meals and plane tickets and toward goods. Container ships, ports and factories couldn’t keep up with the unusual boom, especially as new virus waves spurred occasional shutdowns.Product shortages have raised prices, helping to push inflation up to the fastest pace in nearly 40 years. The big question is whether high inflation will continue in 2022. As the Omicron variant threatens to throw more kinks into global supply lines, economic policymakers worry that it will persist.An Anti-Work Era?About 1.5 million “idlers” and counting have joined a community on the site Reddit dedicated to “those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life.” If you were looking for a perfect expression of pandemic populist angst, that might be it: It’s replete with stories of bad bosses, workday abuses and both planned and spontaneous quits.Redditors weren’t alone in getting excited about leaving jobs this year. Americans quit their jobs at record rates, in what was labeled “The Great Resignation” or the “Big Quit.” Myriad essays and articles have tried to assess why people are throwing in the towel, but most agree that it has something to do with burnout after long months of exposure to public health risk or endless online hours during the pandemic.Some have suggested that a collective life-or-death experience has caused people to reassess their options, while others have suggested that the same government-padded savings that are allowing people to spend so much are giving them the wherewithal to be pickier about where they work and how much they are paid.Burned-Out BoomersThis may also have been the year that “OK, Boomer” ceded the floor to “You OK, Boomer?”A recent Federal Reserve survey of business contacts found that several “noted that baby boomers were leaving jobs and selling businesses to retire early — a trend that was due (1957 marked the peak year for births among baby boomers; those babies turn 65 next year) but has accelerated because of pandemic burnout.”That shows up in the data. People over the age of 45 have been slower to return to the job market since the start of the pandemic. That group includes members of Generation X, which ranges in age from 41 to 56, and baby boomers, who are roughly 57 to 75. It’s not clear if the apparent rush toward early retirement is going to stick: People may go back once the health scare of the pandemic is behind us, or if stocks return to less buoyant valuations, reducing the value of retirement portfolios.What happens next with the middle-age-and-up work force will be pivotal to the future of the labor market. If older workers stay out, America’s labor force participation rate — and the pool of workers available to employers — may remain depressed compared with levels that prevailed before the pandemic. That will be bad news for employers, who are increasingly desperate to hire.Generational Warfare, Skinny Jean EditionDon’t shed all of your tears for the baby boomers, because millennials also had a tough time in 2021. They divided the year between reminding the internet that they are graying, keeping Botox boutiques in business, and feeling aghast as Generation Z, their successors, accused them of being old. A generation that made the poorly informed decision to recycle the low-rise trend also had the gall to claim that side parts make people look aged and skinny jeans are out.Whether their elders are ready for it or not, the reality is that Gen Z, the group born from 1997 to 2012, began to enter adulthood and the labor market in full force during the pandemic. It is a comparatively small generation, but its members could shake things up. They are fully digital natives and have different attitudes toward, and expectations of, work life from those of their older counterparts.If office workers ever actually meet their new colleagues, things could get interesting.Everyone Hates ‘Hard Pants’Speaking of the office, this year put the initials “R.T.O.” firmly into the professional lexicon. Return-to-office planning was repeatedly upended by rolling waves of infection, but that didn’t stop cries of outrage. Many professionals began to question the utility of high heels and slacks — known derisively as “hard pants” — as opposed to their far more beloved and couch-friendly “soft pant” alternative.Whether the future of work-wear will involve more elastic waistbands remains an open question, but it is increasingly clear that America is unlikely to return to many of its old workday habits. Surveys of workers suggest that many did not miss the office, and employers are increasingly turning to hybrid work models and location flexibility, in part to avoid fueling further resignations.Travel Remained DepressedBorders closed, and opened, and closed again or included restrictions as waves of coronavirus tore across the world map this year. The same uncertainties facing national governments kept many travelers at or near home — international travel remains sharply depressed. Global tourism remained 76 percent below prepandemic levels through the third quarter, based on data from the World Tourism Organization.Aside from Emily, it seems that relatively few of us are making it to Paris these days. That’s bad news for travel-dependent industries, and one of the reasons that spending patterns are struggling to shift back toward services and away from furniture, exercise equipment and toys. That has kept inflation high across much of the world.Q.R. Codes Are on the MenuEven when we did shift our consumption dollars back to experiences, those were often much changed by the pandemic.A case in point: Many restaurants have moved to Q.R. codes instead of physical menus. Some of this is for sanitation, but companies are also turning to small doses of automation as a way to cut down on labor as employees are scarce. That has the potential to improve productivity. (The data so far on whether it’s working are mixed.) If companies do become more efficient, it could lay the groundwork for sustainably higher wages: The server who is now juggling twice as many tables as diners order from their phones can take home a fatter paycheck without chipping away at the restaurant’s profits.But it remains to be seen whether workers will win out as companies streamline their operations to meet the moment. So far, corporate profits have been soaring to record highs, but wage gains are not quite keeping up with inflation. Things are changing fast, so how that story develops will be a trend to watch in 2022. More

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    Why Co-Working Spaces Are Betting on the Suburbs

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    Start-ups are betting that the pandemic has spawned a new kind of worker who wants an office space closer to home, without the long commute.Paul Doran, a health care salesman, dreads the thought of commuting back to his office in Manhattan after 19 months of working from home in Jersey City, N.J.But Mr. Doran, 33, also wants a break from overhearing his fiancée’s calls and a better place to meet with clients than the local Starbucks. So he signed up for Daybase, a new company that is opening several co-working spaces, including in Hoboken, close to his apartment.“It would take a couple more zeros on the paycheck,” he said, “to get me back to commuting into Manhattan four or five days a week.”More than a year and a half ago, the coronavirus pandemic triggered an unprecedented disruption to the daily routines of office work, keeping millions of employees in their homes.Now, as the pandemic crawls into a second year, the future of work is still up in the air as many companies have embraced a hybrid model, allowing employees to split their workweek between the office and home, with little clarity about the timing of a mandatory return.In this uncertainty, a growing number of start-ups are betting that the pandemic has spawned a new kind of worker — one who will not be commuting into a central business district five days a week, but would still desire occasional office space closer to home for a distraction-free environment.In the New York City metropolitan area, home to the country’s largest office districts, co-working spaces are increasingly targeting the hundreds of thousands of office workers who live in the suburbs.Some developers who own Manhattan office buildings have scoffed at the idea that satellite workplaces will become a permanent alternative to working from home or from traditional offices, believing the hybrid model is a short-term trend.Still, the emergence of co-working spaces in residential neighborhoods underscores the uncertain prospects for New York’s office sector and its role as an economic engine that supports a vast ecosystem of restaurants, coffee shops and other businesses.The owner of Saks Fifth Avenue is partnering with WeWork to turn parts of department stores into co-working spaces. Codi, a start-up founded in Berkeley, Calif., offers private homes as flexible working spaces. Industrious, a co-working company, has an office space inside a mall in Short Hills, N.J.Daybase, created during the pandemic by a group of former WeWork executives, is opening its first co-working locations in the coming months in the New York City area — Hoboken and Westfield, N.J., as well as in Harrison, N.Y.The company is leasing vacant retail spaces, targeting densely populated neighborhoods where local residents had long prepandemic commutes and few other co-working options. Users can pay $50 for a monthly membership for access to lounge areas or, for instance, use a desk for about $10 an hour.At the heart of Daybase’s thesis is the idea that giving employees the flexibility to work from a suburban office space will ultimately attract a wider talent pool and make New York City more competitive with other cities. The ripple effects would boost the region’s economy, Daybase executives believe, part of an ongoing debate about whether New York City can fully recover only if workers return to Manhattan five days a week.“Certain real estate owners believe the only path to prosperity is to bring everybody back,” said Joel Steinhaus, a Daybase co-founder. “I don’t follow that approach. If we’re thinking about attracting talent to the region, this is more sustainable long-term.”Joel Steinhaus, co-founder of Daybase, is betting on a future in which suburban residents will spend part of their week working out of a co-working space closer to home.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn New York City, the real estate industry has been eager for workers to return to office towers. But many companies have discovered that they can operate with a smaller footprint as more jobs have become fully remote. Despite a recent uptick in demand for Manhattan office leases, the availability of office space there is still near a record high.A recent analysis by Fitch Ratings concluded that if companies were to adopt just a day and a half of remote work per week, office landlords’ profits would fall by 15 percent. At three days, income would be slashed by 30 percent.Jim Whelan, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, a lobbying organization that represents major developers, said his staff has been required to work five days a week in the office since the summer. He believes buildings will fill up as cheaper commercial rents entice companies to lease in Manhattan again.He questioned why employees would use a co-working site on their work-from-home days and brushed off the possibility of employees working remotely part of the week after the pandemic, calling it “your alternate universe.”“Over time, we are going to work a five-day-a-week schedule,” Mr. Whelan said. “There are signs that the commercial market is picking up in the pace of leasing and in terms of how many tenants are out there looking for space.”In the New York region, about 32 percent of workers were in the office in mid-October, according to Kastle Systems, a security company that tracks employee card swipes in office buildings. The percentage has climbed steadily since Labor Day, but is still half of what employers had predicted in a June survey by Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group.A bigger reckoning around office space may unfold in the coming years, as an estimated 30 percent of leases at large Manhattan buildings will expire by 2024, according to the New York State Comptroller’s Office. One major question, economists say, is whether larger companies will hold onto their office space to guarantee seats for all employees, no matter how many days a week they come in.New York City’s office buildings are worth an estimated $172 billion and provide about 20 percent of the city’s property tax revenues. As new leasing plummeted during the pandemic, the value of the buildings dropped by $28.6 billion, the first decline in at least 20 years, according to the New York State Comptroller’s Office, costing the city more than $850 million in property taxes.For many employees, the reluctance to return comes down to the commute.Workers in the New York region had the longest average one-way commute in the country at about 38 minutes, according to 2019 census data. About 23 percent of workers in the region commuted at least an hour each way.In June, Tom Hebner, a vice president at NeuraFlash, a consulting firm, relocated to a co-working space operated by Serendipity Labs in Ridgewood, N.J., where he lives. He said he was reminded of the benefits whenever he visits the company’s New York City office, a round trip that can take up to three hours.“I’m the only guy in the suburbs who can walk to work,” said Mr. Hebner, who works at the Ridgewood location every day with three other NeuraFlash employees.John Arenas, the chief executive of Serendipity Labs, said that when he founded the company a decade ago, his pitch for co-working spaces in the suburbs failed to take off because the corporate world strictly adhered to a five-day workweek in a central office.Since the pandemic hit, Mr. Arenas said, more than half of his revenue now comes from companies that pay for employees to work from a co-working location in the suburbs as a perk.Savills, a real estate firm, has found through surveys of its corporate clients that many employees relocated to the suburbs during the pandemic, prompting companies to seek out Manhattan office spaces near transit hubs, like Pennsylvania Station. But it has also led employees to demand more flexibility to work from home.Offering co-working spaces as a perk could risk creating a fractured work culture where employees feel disconnected from the main office and more willing to switch jobs, said Rebecca Humphrey, an executive vice president at Savills.“If you’re not a company that has a very strong sense of your culture, an approach like this can really fail,” Ms. Humphrey said.Co-working spaces in the suburbs are particularly appealing to parents who want more separation between home and work, Daybase said. In its surveys of prospective customers, the biggest complaints about working from home were the lack of space, unreliable internet and noise (leaf blower day, in particular).Daybase plans to expand nationally through franchising, seeking out spaces that are close to grocery stores, child care options and gyms, with the hopes that workers use the offices as part of a broader daily routine.Mr. Steinhaus, the Daybase co-founder, sees the company as a supplement, not a threat, to the traditional office building. In fact, Daybase itself started leasing office space this summer in a tower near Grand Central Terminal. The company organizes its meetings and happy hours around Wednesdays, the designated day when every employee comes into the office.“The office building is not going anywhere,” Mr. Steinhaus said. “We’re just going to use it differently.” More

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    Return to Office Makes a Big Difference for Budding Lawyers

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    The generational divide on returning to the office is not neatly drawn. For some young professionals, even in a pandemic, showing up is more than half the battle.It looked like a middle-aged person’s idea of what a young person would find fun. There was a dartboard on the wall, a pool table to the side and a Blue Bunny ice cream cart near the entrance, tended to by representatives from H.R.On the Thursday after Labor Day, about 20 attorneys and staff members at the Chicago branch of the law firm Dickinson Wright gathered to commemorate their formal office return. The group bantered gamely while clutching treats, like people who were not especially concerned about the pandemic, but not not concerned about it, either.The only suspicious note was the relative lack of millennials. Near the very end, a first-year associate darted into the room, grabbed a plastic-wrapped ice cream bar and darted out again, barely exchanging more than a sentence or two with colleagues. It seemed like a rebuke to the whole affair.Yet when I later tracked down the associate, Akshita Singh, expecting to find her disillusioned with the office return and irritated by the oldsters trying to sell it, it became clear that something else was going on: She wasn’t conscientiously objecting to the office. She had actually embraced it.“I’ve been coming in every day,” said Ms. Singh, who turned out to be swamped that afternoon. “It’s nice to leave my laptop here knowing I’ll come back tomorrow.”Since the beginning of the year, as mass vaccinations loomed and “return to office” became an incantation so popular it earned its own abbreviation, workers under 40 have been notably resistant.But what the stories of uprisings and generational conflict, even a trying-too-hard office mixer, don’t entirely capture is this: Amid the ranks of 20- and 30-somethings is a large and growing group of employees who, for reasons part careerist and part emotional, increasingly crave the office as well.In a survey by the Conference Board in June, 55 percent of millennials expressed doubts about returning to work, versus 36 percent of baby boomers. By August, with Delta raging, that figure had dropped to 48 percent of millennials. Nearly two-thirds of millennials expressed concern about a “lack of connection” with colleagues, more than any other age group.Ms. Singh, of all people, appeared to reflect the trend. “I see value every time I come in, workwise,” she told me.Akshita Singh joined Dickinson Wright over the summer.Many desks at the firm’s office in Chicago were still empty in September.A Different TackWhen I started asking Chicago-area employers about their R.T.O. plans in the spring, national infection rates were plummeting and well over a million Americans were getting vaccinated each day.Many employers appeared to be nudging workers back to the office in a kind of soft ramp-up over the summer, while circling September as the month when they would commit to it more formally.“We’ll get going on that in July, be full tilt after Labor Day,” Adam Fox, the chief executive of the Chicago Sky, the Women’s National Basketball Association franchise, told me in May.But as the Delta variant of the coronavirus surged, Mr. Fox and other executives pushed their plans off. McDonald’s, whose headquarters is in Chicago, postponed its office opening until Oct. 11.A data management firm, Infutor, which had abandoned its downtown office during the pandemic and expanded its suburban footprint, kept a brave face for weeks. But the day before I was supposed to visit in mid-August to observe how its return plans were progressing, an executive begged off, citing the rising number of Covid-19 cases and the small number of workers who were turning up.We tentatively postponed until mid-September before that date fell through, too. “We are not prepared to reschedule but would like to keep in touch,” a spokeswoman wrote by email. (Infutor now says it won’t consider a formal return until 2022.)Dickinson Wright, a 500-lawyer firm with headquarters in Michigan and offices in 18 U.S. cities and Toronto, took a different tack.A stack of masks on Jim Boland’s desk at Dickinson Wright. The firm has mandated vaccinations for employees and visitors.In late July, as the curve turned upward, the firm was completing its post-Labor Day plans, having concluded that in-person interaction was important for collaboration and training. The firm encouraged all lawyers to spend at least some time in the office regularly, and required many to show up when it was necessary for client work. Younger lawyers were asked to work out a schedule with leaders of the firm if they wanted to stay partly remote.Michael Hammer, the chief executive, confessed to a “medium” level of anxiety but told me that he was heartened by the 89 percent of U.S. personnel who were fully vaccinated. Dickinson Wright was picking up a few more “persuadable people” every week, he said. We set a late-August date for me to visit the Chicago office, which has roughly 20 lawyers.As the visit got close, daily infection rates swelled to around 150,000 nationally. I braced for another cancellation. If I’m being honest, I was secretly rooting for one.But the email never came. Mr. Hammer, who had since mandated vaccinations for all workers and visitors, was convinced that science had spoken. And though the din of the Delta variant might have momentarily drowned it out, he believed the bottom line was still clear: Returning to work was eminently safe for the vaccinated.I told him I’d be sure to bring my vaccination card. “Lol. Thank you,” he responded.Beyond Social BenefitsWhen I turned up at the firm in August, the people who seemed most committed to being back were a handful of partners. Trent Cornell, a litigator who had spent years at the firm that Dickinson Wright acquired to create its Chicago office, and who returned this March after working elsewhere, told me that he had started coming in when he rejoined the firm.“I had so much paper I was taking with me, it was easier to bring it into an office,” he said.Mr. Cornell stuck with it even as the office stayed largely vacant, and felt something had been lost during the months of isolation.“It’s nice to bounce ideas off people,” he said. “If I had a question for you, would I pick up the phone and call?” Not necessarily, he worried.Ms. Singh, the most junior lawyer in the office, was less convinced. Though she acknowledged the benefits of collaborating in person, she seemed more excited about the idea of working from home.“I can sleep longer, work out more, even if the day sometimes doesn’t end at 5,” she told me. “If you come in five days, your weekends are really hectic.” She said she hoped to come in two or three days each week after Labor Day.Trent Cornell, a litigator at the firm, worked at the office in the spring even as it stayed largely vacant.Yet over time, it became clear that the more tenure and experience a lawyer had — the farther you moved up the organizational chart from Ms. Singh to Mr. Cornell — the less urgent it was for the lawyer to be in the office.The partners who came in frequently all had vaguely plausible rationales for why a centralized work space was preferable, but were often at a loss to identify something they could not accomplish without one. Even the casual office drop-by seemed overrated. At a national firm like Dickinson Wright, many co-workers are at other locations whether or not there’s a pandemic.For the firm’s middle ranks, the brass-tacks calculus tilted somewhat more in favor of office time. Jim Boland, a fifth-year associate who joined the firm during the pandemic, complained that remote work was not especially conducive to assimilating.“For the first couple of months, I was like, ‘I don’t know if anyone knows I work here,’” he said.Nicole Sappingfield, a fourth-year associate, shares a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, who recently left a job in sales. She said there were times during the pandemic when both were on calls and her work space at home felt small.Still, she considered the benefits of the office to be largely social. While interviewing for a summer job at the firm, Ms. Sappingfield said, “I loved the fact that everyone had their door open, everyone was popping in and out.”Partners and more senior associates seemed to regard personal interaction as a kind of workplace luxury good that the firm had purchased for them through its safety policies. At one point I asked Ms. Sappingfield about a serial cougher and sniffler we heard in the middle distance.“It’s one of these things when you’re like, ‘What?’ Then you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s fine. Someone could be choking on water,’” she said. “I feel an extra level of security given that the firm has been so good about vaccinations.”Nicole Sappingfield, a fourth-year associate, worked from the firm’s office last month.She said there were times during the pandemic when both she and her husband were on calls and her work space at home felt small.There was, however, one group for whom the benefits of face time were not merely social but exceedingly concrete — the first- and second-year associates. This prompted Mr. Hammer to ask them to spend more time in the office than senior lawyers.As it happens, the most valuable currency for any associate are hours spent working on client business, which are both a measure of productivity and a way for young lawyers to learn their trade.At most large firms, associates have formal quotas for billable hours, typically 1,800 to 2,000 per year. Those who want to be promoted tend to focus on accumulating these hours, which they track with time-keeping software, sometimes monomaniacally. (At Dickinson Wright, the required minimum is 1,850 hours for the first few years.).css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The catch is that few first-year associates enter a firm with work awaiting them. For this, they are largely at the mercy of the senior associates and partners who dispense it.And how, exactly, does one land assignments from these colleagues? It turns out there is no more reliable way than, well, showing up.“People give work to people they think of,” said Amanda Newman, a senior associate in Dickinson Wright’s Phoenix office, who serves as a liaison between associates and management. “If they’re seeing you every day, they think of you.”Or as Ms. Singh, the first-year associate, put it, alluding to a recent assignment: “It was 9 a.m., I was here. Jim’s like, ‘Are you doing anything?’”‘It’s Good to Have Face Time’By late September, attendance was ticking up, and I began to make out a core group of officegoers. One pillar of the group was Mr. Cornell, who was braving a commute that ranged from 30 minutes to over two hours through morning traffic and had spent weeks mulling a return to public transit.“My parking pass for the train station starts on Oct. 1,” he told me, trying to commit himself to the change.He was trying to get back to other parts of his routine, too, with mixed results. He ventured to a Mexican restaurant called Dos Toros for lunch — “not bad” — but mourned the loss of a beloved Mediterranean place that had opened shortly before the pandemic.Ms. Sappingfield, who lived only a mile from the office, often walked. But some days she opted for the L, the elevated-train and subway system, working through calculations about which car seemed least crowded as a train pulled into the station.Ms. Sappingfield searched for the least crowded train car before taking the L to work one day last month.She spent one Thursday fielding increasingly frantic calls from a junior associate in another office who had been summoned to help close a transaction. They would not have been face to face even without a pandemic, but I couldn’t help feeling that the young associate could have benefited from some in-person reassurance.“He’ll say, ‘I know you’re holding my hand, but tell me again what you told me on the walk to work?’” Ms. Sappingfield said.Things seemed briefly under control until the associate learned that the client’s middle initial had appeared incorrectly on a document. “No, you’re OK,” Ms. Sappingfield told the associate when he called for at least the third time in three hours. “We had no way of knowing his middle initial was L rather than a D.”Ms. Singh, too, appeared to be under more stress. “I came in every day this week,” she said, estimating that she was arriving at work between 8:30 and 9 and staying until 6 or 7. “The hours have been a little longer than I expected.”But she seemed increasingly committed to the office. “It’s good to have face time, even if it’s with one person,” she told me.The day before, she had turned in a due-diligence memo to Ms. Sappingfield — an assignment she earned through her tried-and-true method of “being there” — and had to turn around a draft of another, similar memo, which kept her working late into the evening.The second memo was for a senior associate in Columbus, Ohio, but there was a benefit to working on it from the office, too — call it the seamless availability of help. When she got stuck, she simply went down the hall and asked Ms. Sappingfield to unstick her. Though Ms. Singh could have called the associate she was working with, she was reluctant to play phone tag on a question she needed answered quickly.In the Chicago office, she could exploit the tiniest opening in a co-worker’s schedule. “I had a call in two minutes,” Ms. Sappingfield said. “If she were to call me rather than walk into my office two minutes before a call, I probably wouldn’t have answered.”The next week, Ms. Singh showed up all five days. A team including Mr. Boland, who had been brought to the firm to help clients win licenses to produce or dispense cannabis products, asked her to write a memo for a client on marijuana regulations in Illinois. She figured she would get it done from the office, even though it meant trooping in on a Friday, a day most of her colleagues work from home.“I came in because I knew I had something due,” she said. “Almost no one was here.”As the weeks progressed, Ms. Singh seemed increasingly committed to the idea of being in the office. “It’s good to have face time, even if it’s with one person,” she said.By the next Tuesday, she was finally getting caught up on her memos when another assignment landed on her desk — more research on cannabis regulations.I asked if that was how she planned to spend her afternoon. Ms. Singh seemed slightly harried: “That, and an application that’s in the queue for Michigan.” (She wouldn’t get to it until the next week.)I began to wonder if there might be a more relaxed way to train young lawyers — one that didn’t require the same accumulation of office hours, the same anxious petitioning for work and for help. By the standards of Big Law, an industry known for workaholism and burnout, Dickinson Wright seemed humane. On the other hand, it was only six weeks earlier that Ms. Singh had been optimistic about spending a large chunk of her work life at home. Now she was in the office even on a Friday, when it was mostly empty.She did not seem especially troubled by the turnabout, pointing out that the overall volume of work was still manageable even if it did require the occasional late shift or weekend.“I might be jinxing it,” she said, “but I really thought I’d be pulling all-nighters all the time.” More

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    They Never Could Work From Home. These Are Their Stories.

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    Day after day, they went to work.While white-collar America largely worked from the cocoons of their homes, these workers left for jobs elsewhere. Most had no choice.For many workers around the country, the Delta variant’s surge this summer upended long-awaited plans to return to the office this fall. But millions more — including nurses, cashiers, restaurant and grocery workers, delivery drivers, factory workers, janitors and housekeepers — never worked from home in the first place.“They’re the people who often are working around the public, often working in jobs that are requiring them to be at particular risk from the virus,” said Eliza Forsythe, an economist at the University of Illinois. “All of these types of jobs where you’re not sitting at a computer — that’s what’s really been the backbone for allowing the rest of the economy to go remote.”More than a year and a half after the pandemic disrupted nearly all aspects of everyday life, one of the starkest economic divides to emerge has been between workers who can work from home and those who cannot.We asked six never-remote workers about their experiences and they shared their stories below.Just 35 percent of Americans — fewer than 50 million people out of 137 million — worked from home at some point in May 2020 because of the pandemic, when remote work was at its peak, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.Those who could not work from home were employed in a wide array of industries, including health care, agriculture, leisure and hospitality, retail, transportation, construction and manufacturing. Many were considered part of the army of frontline and essential workers, with jobs that were considered so critical that they could not be put on hold even during a public health crisis. They were typically lower-wage, less educated and disproportionately people of color. During a time when millions of Americans lost their jobs, a portion of these workers — those who worked throughout the pandemic or who were only unable to work in the early days of the virus — could be considered relatively lucky. At the same time, many of these never-remote workers could not afford, or did not have the necessary skills, to find other jobs despite the fear of contagion. And a large share also lost their jobs completely, in part because they were unable to work remotely when their businesses temporarily or permanently closed during the pandemic. Many of these workers had jobs in the service industry. Perhaps most importantly, the pandemic has shed more light on how grueling and thankless many of these never-remote jobs are — a parallel universe of work in which millions of employees did not have the luxury of thinking about returning to the office at all.(The workers’ interviews have been edited for length and clarity.)Anjannette Reyes, 54, Orlando, Fla.Airport wheelchair attendantPhotography by Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesSo many didn’t come back to work. People are afraid to work at the airport. We push more than one wheelchair at the same time because we don’t have manpower. Sometimes for international flights, we have 17 wheelchairs and only two of us. We take them through security and run to get the others. People miss flights. People cry. We’re constantly apologizing.I was recently hurt from pushing too many wheelchairs. My whole arm felt like needles and pounding. The doctor said I had a tear. I was off for two weeks. I didn’t get paid for that.I earn $7.58 an hour plus tips. You don’t get sick pay. You don’t get vacation pay. There’s no retirement pay. There are other people who are injured and still pushing chairs. There’s people with back ulcers and shoulder pain. Co-workers are getting sick. I tell them, “Go home.” But they don’t. They rely on the tips to survive.Even though I’m going through this, I don’t feel safe getting another job out there. If there’s another breakout, we’ll feel safer at the airport. This is the only place that kept on going because they needed to move people around — people who were sick, doctors, lawyers. We needed to keep the airport open.Avelina Mendes, 63, Brockton, Mass.College custodianPhotography by Gretchen Ertl for The New York TimesAt first, I didn’t know how serious the virus was. I mean, I protected myself, but I didn’t pay that much attention to it until my sister got Covid. It was Dec. 27.She had the symptoms. She’s 75. She decided to go to the emergency room so she took a shower and then, all of a sudden, she collapsed. She hurt her back. She’s been paralyzed since.She’s in a nursing home now. I used to go and see her from the window and we would talk on the phone. She would tell me what she wants and I would bring it. She likes to eat Cape Verdean food.Every time I think about it, I cry. Then I wipe my tears, put my mask on and go to work.I clock in. I put all the trash outside. After I disinfect the bathroom, I vacuum the lobby. As long as it’s not that many cases on campus, I feel pretty good about it.But if it goes up, that’s when the fear comes. I panic. I lose sleep. When I think about my sister, that could be me. I am out all the time, doing the work.Kim Ducote, 42, St. George, UtahRestaurant server and homeless shelter case managerPhotography by Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesI was jobless from March 15 to August of 2020, and I had $200 left in my bank account. And some friends of mine opened a restaurant and they offered me a serving position there. I was the only server. And I thought ‘Oh my god, this was a godsend.’ Like, I had no idea what I was going to do. I’m down to $200 in my bank, no options. I didn’t really want to go back into the service industry but this was the only opportunity that presented itself.I went back, and things were starting to look up and go well. And I started making money again and people were loving this food and we were really quickly building a name for ourselves. And in October, all three of us got Covid so we had to shut down for I think it was just over six weeks.The husband-and-wife chef team — they got Covid really bad. Their symptoms were pretty severe. And for me, I just had a terrible headache, a very slight cough and severe exhaustion for about three days, and then I bounced right back. And they were unsure how long it was going to take them to reopen.So during that time, I decided ‘Well, I can’t be jobless again for an indefinite period of time. I have to look for something else.’ So I applied at a local homeless shelter and I got a job there.Juan Sanchez Bernal, 62, Harrison, N.J.Commuter rail custodianPhotography by Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesWhen the pandemic began, the number of people we saw in the offices, it almost dropped to half. It created panic. Many of us would have loved to work from home, but sadly, because we are cleaning people, how can we?One employee from our group got sick and died. I felt sad. We were a team, you know? We talked about baseball, basketball, about the countries we came from.This is the country that chose us. If in a moment of crisis, we got to choose between the things we like and the things we don’t like, what’s the contribution we are making? We have all done the essential work required — we have all contributed our grain of sand.We didn’t stop working. I arrive at 6 in the morning. We take out the trash. We are always disinfecting. We always use masks.My youngest daughter studied from home because her university was closed. She was watching over me. When I came back from work, she was all over me: Did you wash your hands? Take off your clothes! Take a shower right now! My other daughter called all the time.I would tell them, ‘Remember that everybody who was born has to die, so calm down.’ They laughed. If you get more stressed, you’ll die faster. So, you better laugh.Isabela Burrows, 19, Grand Blanc, Mich.Pet store workerPhotography by Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesI don’t want people to be treated the same way that I have been and to feel that loneliness and fear that I felt.I started working at a major pet store in late September last year. I made $10.50 an hour. For the first five months of my job, I was just a cashier. One day, a tall, bulky man leaned around my Plexiglas shield and purposely coughed. I think we were out of the dog food that he needed or something.My brother passed on May 22. He was my little buddy. He had a stroke that crushed his brain stem. He couldn’t keep going, so we decided it would be best if we took him off life support. My manager was not empathetic or compassionate. She even told me to just get over it, that my feelings from home didn’t transfer over to work. It was traumatic. I was not comfortable working in that store anymore. I transferred in mid-June.My new store is short staffed. We’re all being wrung dry. You’ll be trying to unload inventory from a truck shipment and then there will be someone needing fish or four different phone calls. Sometimes someone will forget to give the birds more millet.I’m worried about the weather getting cold again, if the cases will spike and whether my family and co-workers will be safe. I’ve already had one loss this year.April Fitch, 58, Newark, N.J.Airport security guardPhotography by Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesMore people would have preferred to stay home or work from home. If I had that opportunity, I would have, most definitely.I caught Covid at the end of March. I was not feeling well. My mom was in a nursing home. I called her on April 6 and told her that my birthday was soon. I told her, “I’m coming to break you out of the house.” She laughed. On April 8, the nursing home called me and told me she was taken to the hospital. A week later she passed away due to Covid.I ended up using two weeks of vacation days, all of my sick days and they gave me my three days for bereavement. There was no time to even deal with the fact that I lost my mom while I was dealing with Covid myself.The first day going back to work was scary. I’m still scared. It’s very crowded now. I try to stay six feet apart. If someone asks me a question, I try to keep them at a distance.Aidan Gardiner contributed reporting on the worker interviews. Eduardo Varas translated Juan Sanchez’s interview from Spanish. More

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    If You Never Met Your Co-Workers in Person, Did You Even Work There?

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    Kathryn Gregorio joined a nonprofit foundation in Arlington, Va., in April last year, shortly after the pandemic forced many people to work from home. One year and a zillion Zoom calls later, she had still never met any of her colleagues, aside from her boss — which made it easier to quit when a new job came along.Chloe Newsom, a marketing executive in Long Beach, Calif., cycled through three new jobs in the pandemic and struggled to make personal connections with co-workers, none of whom she met. Last month, she joined a start-up with former colleagues with whom she already had in-person relationships.And Eric Sun, who began working for a consulting firm last August while living in Columbus, Ohio, did not meet any of his co-workers in real life before leaving less than a year later for a larger firm. “I never shook their hands,” he said.The coronavirus pandemic, now more than 17 months in, has created a new quirk in the work force: a growing number of people who have started jobs and left them without having once met their colleagues in person. For many of these largely white-collar office workers, personal interactions were limited to video calls for the entirety of their employment.Never having to be in the same conference room or cubicle as a co-worker may sound like a dream to some people. But the phenomenon of job hoppers who have not physically met their colleagues illustrates how emotional and personal attachments to jobs may be fraying. That has contributed to an easy-come, easy-go attitude toward workplaces and created uncertainty among employers over how to retain people they barely know.Already, more workers have left their jobs during some pandemic months than in any other time since tracking began in December 2000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In April, a record 3.9 million people, or 2.8 percent of the work force, told their employers they were throwing in the towel. In June, 3.8 million people quit. Many of those were blue-collar workers who were mostly working in person, but economists said office workers who were stuck at home were also most likely feeling freer to bid adieu to jobs they disliked.“If you’re in a workplace or a job where there is not the emphasis on attachment, it’s easier to change jobs, emotionally,” said Bob Sutton, an organizational psychologist and a professor at Stanford University.While this remote work phenomenon is not exactly new, what’s different now is the scale of the trend. Shifts in the labor market usually develop slowly, but white-collar work has evolved extremely quickly in the pandemic to the point where working with colleagues one has never met has become almost routine, said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank.“What it says the most about is just how long this has dragged on,” she said. “All of a sudden, huge swaths of white-collar workers have completely changed how they do their work.”The trend of people who go the duration of their jobs without physically interacting with colleagues is so new that there is not even a label for it, workplace experts said.Many of those workers who never got the chance to meet colleagues face to face before moving on said they had felt detached and questioned the purpose of their jobs.Ms. Gregorio, 53, who worked for the nonprofit in Virginia, said she had often struggled to gauge the tone of emails from people she had never met and constantly debated whether issues were big enough to merit Zoom calls. She said she would not miss most of her colleagues because she knew nothing about them.“I know their names and that’s about it,” she said.Other job hoppers echoed the feeling of isolation but said the disconnect had helped them reset their relationship with work and untangle their identities, social lives and self-worth from their jobs.Joanna Wu, who started working for the accounting firm PwC last September, said her only interactions with colleagues were through video calls, which felt like they had a “strict agenda” that precluded socializing.“You know people’s motivation is low when their cameras are all off,” said Ms. Wu, 23. “There was clear disinterest from everyone to see each other’s faces.”Joanna Wu said her only interactions with colleagues were through video calls, which felt like they had a “strict agenda” that precluded socializing.Akilah Townsend for The New York TimesInstead, she said, she found solace in new hobbies, like cooking various Chinese cuisines and inviting friends over for dinner parties. She called it “a double life.” In August, she quit. “I feel so free,” she said.Martin Anquetil, 22, who started working at Google in August last year, also never met his colleagues face to face. Google did not put much effort into making him feel connected socially, he said, and there was no swag or other office perks — like free food — that the internet company is famous for..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Anquetil said his attention had begun to wander. His lunchtime video game sessions seeped into work time, and he started buying basketball highlights on N.B.A. Top Shot, a cryptocurrency marketplace, while on the clock. In March, he quit Google to work at Dapper Labs, the start-up that teamed up with the National Basketball Association to create Top Shot.If one wants to work at Google and “put in 20 hours a week and pretend you’re putting in 40 while doing other stuff, that’s fine, but I wanted more connection,” he said.Google declined to comment.To help prevent more people from leaving their jobs because they have not formed in-person bonds, some employers are reconfiguring their corporate cultures and spinning up new positions like “head of remote” to keep employees working well together and feeling motivated. In November, Facebook hired a director of remote work, who is responsible for helping the company adjust to a mostly remote work force.Other companies that quickly shifted to remote work have not been adept at fostering community over video calls, said Jen Rhymer, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford who studies workplaces.“They can’t just say, ‘Oh, be social, go to virtual happy hours,’” Dr. Rhymer said. “That by itself is not going to create a culture of building friendships.”She said companies could help isolated workers feel motivated by embracing socialization, rather than making employees take the initiative. That includes scheduling small group activities, hosting in-person retreats and setting aside time for day-to-day chatter, she said.Employers who never meet their workers in person are also contributing to job hopping by being more willing to let workers go. Sean Pressler, who last year joined Potsandpans.com, an e-commerce website in San Francisco, to make marketing videos, said he was laid off in November without warning.Mr. Pressler, 35, said not physically meeting and getting to know his bosses and peers made him expendable. If he had built in-person relationships, he said, he would have been able to get feedback on his pan videos and riff on ideas with colleagues, and may have even sensed that cutbacks were coming well before he was let go.Instead, he said, “I felt like a name on a spreadsheet. Just someone you could hit delete on.”And his co-workers? “I don’t even know if they know who I was,” he said. More

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    Amazon Faces Wider Fight Over Labor Practices

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    A second union vote may be held at an Alabama warehouse, and new tactics by the Teamsters and other groups aim to pressure Amazon across the country.Since the start of the pandemic, Amazon has ramped up its hiring, bringing on hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide. But challenges to the company’s labor practices are growing quickly, too.Those challenges were underscored when a hearing officer for the National Labor Relations Board recommended a new union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, saying the company’s conduct during the organizing campaign had precluded a fair vote.The board’s regional office will rule on the recommendation in the coming weeks. If it leads to a new election, as seems likely, the union would face long odds of victory. But Amazon faces a widening campaign to rein in the power it wields over its employees and their workplace conditions.Those efforts include a campaign by the Teamsters that would generally circumvent traditional workplace elections and pressure the company through protests, boycotts and even fights against its expansion efforts at the local level. Legislation in California would force Amazon to reveal its productivity quotas, which unions contend are onerous and put workers at risk.Throughout the pandemic, Amazon warehouse workers have protested what they consider unsafe conditions, sometimes resulting in embarrassment for the company, as with the disclosure of notes from an internal meeting in which an Amazon executive called a worker-turned-protester “not smart, or articulate.”In April, the general counsel of the labor board found merit to charges that Amazon fired two white-collar workers who had raised concerns last year about the conditions facing the company’s warehouse workers during the pandemic. The election in Alabama brought intense scrutiny of the company’s labor practices, with even President Biden taking it as an opportunity to warn employers that “there should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda” during such a campaign.In a statement after the hearing officer’s recommendation was reported on Monday, Amazon said, “Our employees had a chance to be heard during a noisy time when all types of voices were weighing into the national debate, and at the end of the day, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers.”Since the results were announced in early April, showing that Amazon won by more than two to one, many unions and union supporters have argued that the outcome points to the need for new tactics to organize the company.Perhaps the most prominent voice in this discussion is the more than one-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which approved a resolution at its convention in June committing the union to “supply all resources necessary” to organize workers at the company and help them win a union contract.The Teamsters argue that holding union votes at individual work sites is typically futile at a company like Amazon, because labor law allows employers to wage aggressive anti-union campaigns, and because high turnover means union supporters often leave the company before they have a chance to vote.Instead, the Teamsters favor a combination of tactics like strikes, protests and boycotts that pressure the company to come to the bargaining table and negotiate a contract covering wages, benefits and working conditions. While the union hasn’t laid out its tactics in detail, it recently organized walkouts involving drivers and dockworkers at a port in Southern California to protest the drivers’ treatment there.They hope to enlist the help of workers at other companies, sympathetic consumers and even local businesses threatened by a giant like Amazon, partly to mitigate the challenges presented by high employee turnover.“Building our relationships within the community itself is the way to deal with that,” Randy Korgan, a Teamsters official from Southern California who is the union’s national director for Amazon, said in a recent interview. “We could have filed for an election in a number of places in the last more than a year, gotten into that process, but we realize that the election process has its shortcomings.”The union believes that it can pull a variety of political levers to help put the company on the defensive. Mr. Korgan cited a recent vote by the City Council in Fort Wayne, Ind., denying Amazon a tax abatement after a local Teamsters official spoke out against it, and a vote by the City Council in Arvada, Colo., to reject a more than 100,000-square-foot Amazon delivery station. While the Arvada vote centered on traffic concerns, Teamsters played a role in drumming up opposition.In California, the Teamsters have joined forces with the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, an advocacy group, to back a bill that would require certain employers to disclose the often opaque productivity quotas applied to workers, which they can be disciplined or fired for failing to meet. The legislative language makes it clear that Amazon is the main target.The bill, offered by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the author of a 2019 law effectively requiring gig companies to classify workers as employees, would also direct the state’s occupational safety and health agency to develop a regulation ensuring that such quotas don’t put workers at high risk of injury. It passed the State Assembly in May and will be considered by the State Senate later this summer.Other labor groups are pressing ahead with less orthodox efforts to increase the power of Amazon workers. Over the first six months of this year, a group called the Solidarity Fund, which raises money from individual tech workers, distributed over $100,000 in grants to workers seeking to organize their colleagues to push for workplace improvements.About half the money, in $2,500 increments, went to workers at Amazon. It funded a laptop to assist with organizing, as well as hiring a freelance graphic designer to help make pamphlets, among the varied efforts. Later this month, the fund will begin accepting applications for a second round of grants.The group’s sister organization, called Coworker.org, is putting together a detailed report on workplace surveillance measures, including a number of technologies that it says Amazon either developed or pays other companies to use. Along with these efforts, the company is likely to face another high-profile election at its warehouse in Bessemer, Ala. Labor law experts said that in such cases a regional director typically accepts the recommendation of the hearing officer, who argued for setting aside the results.The officer recommended the dismissal of many of the union’s objections to the election, including the contention that Amazon illegally threatened workers with a loss of pay or benefits if they unionized. But she found that a collection box that Amazon pressured the U.S. Postal Service to install near the warehouse entrance gave workers the impression that the company was monitoring who was voting, thereby tainting the outcome.A union brief described how Amazon surrounded the collection box with a tent, on which it printed a company campaign message (“Speak for Yourself”) and the instruction “Mail Your Ballot Here.” The union noted that Amazon’s surveillance cameras could record workers entering and leaving the tent. The company did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.If the labor board’s regional office accepts the recommendation to order a new election, Amazon has vowed to appeal to the five-member board in Washington. A recent shift there may affect the outcome: Democrats were assured control of the board in late July, when the Senate confirmed two of President Biden’s nominees.Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which oversaw the union campaign at the Amazon warehouse, acknowledged in an interview after the first election that high turnover at Amazon and the company’s ability to hold mandatory anti-union meetings made winning a vote difficult. But he said that a long-term campaign could be victorious.“I think that we’re going to be able to build on this,” Mr. Appelbaum said. “We pushed the ball downfield. Maybe it’s not the first election. Maybe it’s the second or third election.”Workers have long complained that one of the most fundamental features of an Amazon warehouse is the amount of control the company exerts — over the pace of work, the way workers perform it, the frequency of their breaks, the time they must spend waiting at metal detectors on their way home.In its objection to the election results, the union argued that Amazon had tried to assert a similar level of control over the voting itself, through measures like the collection box. Now the labor board appears on the verge of clawing some of that power back.The board’s role in administering union elections was “usurped” by Amazon’s conduct in obtaining the box, the hearing officer said. That conduct, she said, “justifies a second election.” More

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    Covid Variant Adds to Worker Anxieties

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    Some see an undue rush by employers to get workplaces back to normal, whether by dropping precautions or imposing new rules.When Kelly Harris, a personal grocery shopper in Steubenville, Ohio, was vaccinated in March against Covid-19, it was a huge relief. “I felt the weight of the world off my shoulders,” she said.Her sense of relief has turned to dread. After most supermarkets eased masking requirements in May, mask wearing plummeted in her area. She worried about bringing the virus home to her school-age children.Then, as the Delta variant proliferated in recent weeks, her anxiety levels spiked again. “I try to stay away from everybody and use self-checkout,” she said. “It has me pretty stressed out.”Judging from the policies of the stores Ms. Harris frequents, many employers appear to regard the recent increase in Covid infections as a mere blip on the long-awaited road to normal.Some companies have intensified their efforts to return to a pandemic before-times, easing safety protocols while expecting employees to return to previous routines.But for many workers, the perception is quite different: a sense of rising vulnerability and frustration even for the vaccinated, who find themselves inundated with stories of breakthrough infections and long Covid.The gulf between employers’ actions and workers’ concerns appears to foreshadow a period of rising tensions between the two, and unions appear to be positioning themselves for it. Some unions are calling on companies to do more to keep members safe, while others are questioning new vaccination requirements. The two positions may seem at odds, but they send a common message: Not so fast.“I think we’re rushing to return to normal,” said Marc Perrone, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which has over one million members in industries like groceries and meatpacking.Many workers complain about a mismatch between plans their employers appear to have made before the rise of the variant and the reality of the past few weeks.For much of the pandemic, Amazon has offered free on-site Covid testing for employees. It incorporated a variety of design features into warehouses to promote social distancing. But a worker at an Amazon warehouse in Oregon, who did not want to be named for fear of retribution, said there had been a gradual reduction in safety features, like the removal of physical barriers to enforce social distancing.Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, said that the company had removed barriers in some parts of warehouses where workers don’t spend much time in proximity, but that it had kept up distancing measures in other areas, like break rooms.“We’re continuously evaluating the temporary measures we implemented in response to Covid-19 and making adjustments in alignment with public health authority guidance,” Ms. Nantel said. She added that the company would “begin ramping down our U.S. testing operations by July 30, 2021.”At REI, the outdoor equipment and apparel retailer, four workers in different parts of the country, who asked not to be named for fear of workplace repercussions, complained that the company had recently enacted a potentially more punitive attendance policy it had planned to put in place just before the pandemic. Under the policy, part-time workers who use more than their allotted sick days are subject to discipline up to termination if the absences are unexcused. The workers also said they were concerned that many stores — after restricting capacity until this spring — had become more and more crowded.Halley Knigge, a spokeswoman for REI, said that under its new policies the company allowed part-time workers to accrue sick leave for the first time and that the disciplinary policy was not substantively new but merely reworded. The stores, she added, continue to restrict occupancy to no more than 50 percent capacity, as they have since June 2020.Workers elsewhere in the retail industry also complained about the growing crowds and difficulty of distancing inside stores like supermarkets. Karyn Johnson-Dorsey, a personal shopper from Riverside, Calif., who finds work on Instacart but also has her own roster of clients, said it had been increasingly difficult to maintain a safe distance from unmasked customers since the state eased masking and capacity restrictions in mid-June.“You have whole families who are picking out a pound of ground beef,” she said. “Children who are not vaccinated because of age are touching everything, not masked, either.”Amazon’s warehouse on Staten Island. Workers at Amazon have become concerned in recent weeks that the company is overly eager to wind down safety measures.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesMs. Johnson-Dorsey, who had Covid last year and was vaccinated in March, said that what she was encountering in stores had become a major source of worry as the Delta variant spread. “I think it’s just showing that maybe we jumped too quickly to try and beat this imaginary deadline,” she said.On Tuesday, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided new guidance on masking, some employers said they would adjust their policies as warranted.“We’d always defer to state and local ordinances on capacity and masking mandates,” said a spokeswoman for Albertsons, which also owns Safeway and Jewel-Osco. “We don’t have a national mandate on capacity at this time.”Ms. Harris and Ms. Johnson-Dorsey, the personal shoppers, do not belong to a union, but Bob O’Toole, the president of the food workers local in Chicago, which represents more than 15,000 workers in the grocery, meatpacking and food-processing industries, said many of his members shared their sentiments.“The employees don’t feel as though the employers are doing anything to enhance safety after so many precautions were relaxed,” he wrote in a text message..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Perrone, the international president for the food workers union, said in a statement on Tuesday that the new C.D.C. guidance wasn’t sufficient and urged a national mask mandate.Public-sector workers, too, have expressed safety concerns as officials move to get government services back to prepandemic norms. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot recently brought back office-based city employees who had been working remotely during the pandemic.But one of the unions representing them, the Illinois council of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has argued that more needs to be done to space workers apart and improve ventilation.“The workplaces where those people work could be sources of transmission because we live in a cubicle world where people are often very close together,” said Roberta Lynch, the union’s executive director in the state. “We want to ensure that people who have high-risk work locations are able to work safely.”A spokeswoman for the mayor did not respond to a request for comment.The Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents nurses who are increasingly subject to vaccine requirements around the country, is unlikely to take a position on the mandates per se but will seek to have a voice in setting policy to guarantee that employees are treated fairly, said Sandy Pope, its bargaining director. For example, the union wants to ensure that no workers are disciplined or fired for refusing the vaccine if they have legitimate reasons for doing so.“We will demand to be consulted on these things,” Ms. Pope said. “I know a couple of members who have legitimate health issues that have prevented them from being vaccinated.”The union, which also represents clerical workers at insurance companies, credit unions and universities, has employee-management committees pushing to arrange adequate ventilation systems for workers, with mixed results, she said. She added that the union was preparing for a potential standoff in September, when many employers have said they will end hybrid work arrangements and require full-time attendance.“I think that’s going to be the big fight,” Ms. Pope said. “A number of employers had September as the target date.”The Culinary Workers Union, which represents casino workers in Las Vegas, has been calling for the return of a mask requirement for all customers indoors since Nevada relaxed the rule in May.John Locher/Associated PressBy contrast, the United Automobile Workers union said it was working with major automakers through a Covid task force to help make safety decisions. General Motors and Ford Motor both recently reinstituted masking for all employees at separate sites in Missouri, and Ford reinstituted masking at offices in Florida, after the companies assessed virus-related data in those regions. And a number of employers, including Amazon and the meat processor JBS, have had vaccination facilities for workers on site.Some unions may have been spared a fight by the C.D.C.’s move on Tuesday. In Las Vegas, the Culinary Workers Union, which represents casino workers, has been calling for the return of a mask requirement for all customers indoors since Nevada relaxed the requirement in May. The casinos had not heeded the call, but after the C.D.C. announcement, the state said it would reimpose an indoor mask mandate.In other cases, a reckoning still looms. The federal government’s mask mandate on airplanes is set to expire after Sept. 13, and unions representing airplane personnel are uneasy about the possibility that it will lapse, though Tuesday’s C.D.C. announcement suggests it may be more likely to be extended. The unions have applauded the airlines for moving to stop the spread of the coronavirus on airplanes by installing more sophisticated air filtration systems, but maintain that they are not sufficient.“Filtration is helpful for circulated air in the cabin,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “But it doesn’t stop the general spread from one person to another sitting six inches apart.” More