Free Republic

During an address on Wednesday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey took a jab at remote work while praising the benefits of downtown Minneapolis. While speaking at the Minneapolis Downtown Council’s annual meeting, Mayor Frey, a Democrat, joked that remote work ultimately turns you into “a loser.” “I don’t know if you saw this study the other day, what this study clearly showed… is that when people who have the ability to come downtown but don’t,” Frey explained. “When they stay home, sitting on their couch with their nasty cat blanket, diddlin’ on their laptop. If they do that for a few...

The number of American workers hired by international companies grew 62% last year, according to the State of Global Hiring Report from Deel, an HR platform that specializes in global hiring. The report is based on 300,000 contracts between Deel customers and workers for both contractors and full-time employees, and roughly 85% of those contracts are for remote positions. American workers are most likely to be hired by companies in the U.K., Canada, France, Singapore and Australia. The spike in U.S. workers vying for remote jobs headquartered overseas “feels correlated with the elimination of remote roles” stateside, says Deel CEO...

After three years of haphazard plans for getting workers back at their desks, the return-to-office movement has entered a phase of remorse. A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of employees' office attendance, their usage of office amenities and other related factors, according to new research from Envoy. "Many companies are realizing they could have been a lot more measured in their approach, rather than making big, bold, very controversial decisions based on executives' opinions rather than employee data," Larry Gadea, Envoy's...

Roughly two-thirds (66%) of 700 financial executives who worked remotely part time said they would quit their jobs if they were forced to return to the office five days a week, according to a survey published Tuesday by Deloitte.“Professionals — men and women alike — whose work and personal lives have been reshaped by remote work largely want to maintain flexibility even if it comes at a personal cost,” the accounting firm said in its report.That cost may be corporate advancement, the survey suggests. More than half of respondents (52%) said they thought in-office workers were paid more. Likewise, 63%...

The media, Biden, and other Democrats keep bragging how great Bidenomics is and how good the job market is. That would especially make it good for kids who went to college because they make more than people who didn't. Yet we get these sob stories, that essentially are campaigning for other people to pay off student loan debt, whining that after three years of letting people skip paying their loans, they are all of a sudden are going to have to pay. What a concept! Paying off your own debt. Somehow, only half are going to be required to pay...

Working from home is killing office buildings’ worth. As remote and hybrid work prove to be enduring trends, researchers are predicting grim fates for the future value of New York City’s commercial workplaces. New York University and Columbia University researchers have updated a 2022 study to reflect new findings that offices will be even more impacted by remote work than they previously calculated. “We now estimate a more persistent work-from-home regime, which has more of an impairment of office values even in the long run,” Arpit Gupta, co-author of the study, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse,”...

In June 2022, Apple CEO Tim Cook sounded pretty philosophical about remote work. "We're running the mother of all experiments,” he said at the TIME 100 symposium in New York, “because we don't know," he trailed off. Just a couple months later, though, he ordered staff back three days a week. And now he’s reportedly threatening to discipline the holdouts. In other words, the experiment may be losing steam. Apple is threatening to level disciplinary action against workers who fail to come into the office for three-fifths of the working week, Zoë Schiffer, managing editor of tech newsletter Platformer, tweeted...

A growing number of office landlords are defaulting on loan payments as the rise of remote work causes more corporate tenants to rethink long-term leases... The delinquency rate on office loans increased by a quarter percentage point to 1.83% last month .. While the number is still relatively low, the increase was the sharpest of its kind since December 2021. ... The shift away from traditional offices has impacted major firms. Brookfield Asset Management recently disclosed a default on more than $70 million in debt on two office towers in Los Angeles. In Manhattan, real estate firm RXR is reportedly...

I have a full-time job (which is now fully remote, yay) and am looking for more remote part-time work. What people are now calling "overemployed."Question: it seems to me that it's best to have a second phone line for business -- both for security/privacy purposes and just to keep personal and work lives separate. Do others of you do the same? I've looked into dual SIM, Tracfone, Mint Mobile, etc. Virtual phones (Google Voice) have their place but can't be used in every situation (i.e., some places/services will not accept a virtual phone for verification and apparently are able to...

Leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, roughly 95% of commercial office space was occupied across the United States, according to US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) – a nonprofit, non-government organization. By March 2020, occupancy plummeted to 10%, and has only recovered to 47%, according to a new NBER report which claims $453 billion in office commercial real estate value has been wiped out in an "office real estate apocalypse."Around the US, that resulted in a 17.5 percent decrease in lease revenue between January 2020, and May 2022, and not only because fewer offices were being occupied, but also...

If you missed this story last week, the summary is that there are some real estate experts who believe the pandemic may have created a new normal, one that has major implications for our cities. I can summarize this in three steps.First, when the pandemic hit, there were lots of white collar workers who decided to leave the city and ride out the storm in their 2nd homes in the Hamptons or Vermont or wherever they could go that was away from lots of other people. On top of this, you had the lockdowns which forced many corporations to be...

When millions of office employees started working from home in 2020, the plan for most was eventually to return to work, not stay remote forever. But two and a half years later, many workers really don’t want to go back to the office, and companies are struggling to figure out how to convince them to return, offering enticements like free food, prizes, and even alcoholic beverages to draw workers back. Some companies are getting more creative than that, as this person who wrote to me recounts: "I have seen a lot of lures, and none of them are working. Free...

Labor Day marks the line in the corporate sand. Many company leaders say the end-of-summer holiday represents the best chance to finally lean on workers to return to the office this year. After months of encouraging white-collar employees to return, or attempting to coax them back with free pizza, warm cookies and catered lunches, many executives now say they feel emboldened to take a tougher stance. No longer can workers merely come to the office if they so choose; this fall, executives say, attendance is expected and the office resisters will be put on notice. ... ...After Spotify offered most...

Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs will lift all COVID protocols that have kept some workers away as it pushes all employees to return to the office five days a week after Labor Day, The Post has learned. In a memo sent Tuesday obtained by The Post, Goldman Sachs told workers it will no longer require vaccines, COVID testing or masks — a signal it won’t accept excuses for employees who claimed COVID as a reason for working from home. “There is significantly less risk of severe illness,” the memo stated. “In line with [the CDC’s] updated protocols, if you have...

To Jonathan Pruiett, it just didn't make sense. A geospatial analyst who updates Google maps for a living, Pruiett had been called back to his company's offices in Bothell, Washington, five days a week, starting June 6. Like many on his team, Pruiett had only worked remotely, having started the job in the pandemic. He'd adapted well to it, finding efficiencies such as multitasking during virtual meetings, using the time to process data. And yet, now he was being told to report to office. Anyone who failed to report within three days of the return date would be processed as...

A top artificial intelligence executive at Apple is leaving the company over its return-to-office policy, according to a report. The news comes as Apple orders all corporate employees to return to the office for three days per week — a stricter policy than Big Tech competitors like Meta, Google and Amazon, which are allowing at least some employees to work remotely forever. Director of machine learning Ian Goodfellow announced his resignation last week, telling colleagues that CEO Tim Cook’s push to get employees back into the office had driven him out.

A real tragedy. The Democrats have destroyed what was once a gem of a city.Thanks Democrats. You guys and your policies are doing an awesome job. Hey America this could be your town too if you keep voting Democrat. https://t.co/txaMeHyRXh— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 28, 2022Downtown Seattle business continues remote work because of crime, not COVIDBy K5, March 2nd, 2022SEATTLE — A downtown Seattle tech company won’t bring workers back to the office until they feel it’s safe, not because of COVID-19, but crime.Businesses continue to speak out about the ongoing violence in the downtown core, specifically in the...

The Omicron surge has forced businesses to again delay a date for a return to the office. And that means a delay to an inevitable showdown: between workers and managers over remote or office-based work. To a degree, every business will have by now adapted to the reality of a hybrid workplace and the fact some staff will remain home-based while others will come back to the office. Any business that cannot offer a hybrid workplace will face problems in recruitment during this worker shortage. And problems in developing in-house, the skills of managing a modern workforce.HOME MONITORSFor work at...

Even fully remote workers in the automobile industry are subject to a corporate vaccine mandate that threatens the livelihood of those who assert their right to medical freedom.Even fully remote workers in the automobile industry are subject to a corporate vaccine mandate that threatens the livelihood of those who assert their right to medical freedom. An FAQ sent out by the company threatens those who do not comply with the vaccine mandate, warning, “Individuals who do not report their status by December 4, 2021 will be considered unvaccinated.” The penalty for being unvaccinated? “Those who do not meet the vaccination...

When President Biden issued his edict mandating vaccines for all federal employees and contractors, along with employees in private-sector companies with 100 or more employees, there were a lot of questions about how the order would be implemented. We now know the answers to some of the more pressing questions that have been raised and one thing has become abundantly clear: The Biden administration is using 1984 as an instruction manual.The White House issued “Guidance for Federal Contractors and Subcontractors” on Friday detailing the new vaccination policy. The COVID-19 workplace safety protocols “will apply to all covered contractor employees, including...