>I recognize you're playing devil's advocate here to some extent, so please don't take this as trying to jump on you. I'm just a teensy bit angry about the way the discourse has shaken out in the media.

How has the discourse shaken out in the media.

I don't think I'm trying to play devil's advocate here. I'm just pointing out that WFH has major trade offs that simply need to be considered. People on this sub absolutely refuse the consider trade offs in all the things they demand.

>"But city employees set an example to private industry" say de Blasio and Adams, to which I say bullshit. City employees are universally looked down on by private industry and public discourse.

I disagree. I think it is about building credibility. It is harder to convincingly argue that working in office is important if you are telling your own employees that they don't need to come into the office. Note, my personal stance here is to push for a hybrid model.

> It kills me that for a brief minute workers in non-union office jobs had that moment of "Fuck you I'm not going back" and it's not turning into a massive labor movement, but here we are.

Massive labor movement? . . . The primary beneficiaries of work from home were upscale, educated white collar professionals. Do you think blue collar and service sector workers view white collar professionals as compatriots in class solidarity? Because I can tell you they do not. They look at us as spoiled brats who reaped a massive advantage during covid, lecturing others from behind a computer screen while their own suffered and had to go into work in person. Construction workers, small business owners, maintenance workers, healthcare workers . . . what do these people have to gain from a work-from-home strike?

We should all have the dignity to admit that work from home is an incredibly privilege afforded to upscale white collar professionals and no one else. Whether we earned it or not, the truth of the matter is that we have that bargaining power and it just is what it is. Nobody has to apologize for it. But let's stop pretending that a bunch of six figure earners are Haymarket protestors.

> Really?? Lmao, fuck your condescension. You made a statement without anything to back it up.

What exactly do you need back up for. Do you understand the concept or not?

>Which civic resources, specifically, are we going to run out of?

Economic Revenue to businesses and employees in this city; Tax Revenue.

>The MTA may be crying about lost revenue due to ridership being down, but the fact is that there are plenty of people coming in to the office at least one day a week and tourists are back en force.

No, the fact is that MTA ridership is down 30-40% and it is not sustainable to keep up operations at the same level. So the city and state will need to make a big decision on how they are gong to fix that gap.

> It's readjusting, if anything.

Okay, and the readjustment will be toward lower investment into public services. And that trade off might be worth it if most people are just sitting at home anyways.

Okay, let's start from the beginning. Did you understand the part where I described how commuters into the city inject money into the local economy through spending?

One of the hardest things to do on this sub is to explain to people that not every problem is caused by evil people doing obviously evil things that could be magically solved with the wave of someone's hands.

The NYC is built the way it is, for better or worse, mostly better considering how prosperous the city is. To expect this behemoth of a city to just magically adapt to the new normal is asking a lot.

>Someone really needs to explain to me the mentality that people who can do their jobs fine from home must come into an office.

At the risk of being swarmed, I will give it a shot.

The mayor is responsible for the city as a collective. He has to balance competing interests and priorities. That doesn't mean he's doing a good job of it, but that is technically his job.

For the health of the city - financial, social, cultural - it is valuable to have people working in the city because that leads to dollars being directly injected into the NYC economy. Nearly one million people commuted into NYC every day. They would spend money at drug stores, local retail, local restaurants. With WFH, that money is staying in New Jersey and Westchester and Long Island.

And that might be the future, but it's going to cause financial and social issues for New York City. Less money injected into the economy = less tax collection and that's less money for schools, parks and public services like transit. These are just the facts.

At the individual level, it is totally reasonable, understandable and justifiable to want to work from home. I work from home 3 or 4 days a week myself and I don't feel like going into the office. I'm not quite sure that's sustainable at the civic level. We are eventually going to run out of resources.

Now my suggestion is that we ultimately need to allow government employees to WFH a few days a week just to keep talent and keep morale high. But it is a tough trade off, and keeping individuals happy will have ramifications for the collective. My follow up suggestion to this is for the city of NY to commit to developing 500K housing units over the next 10 years. We can limit the impact of WFH by offsetting with a growing population.

That's the RJ Barrett of sanitation.

Yes, a lot of progressives are finding out that backing slogans requires a lot of money, money that often isn't there or can't be prioritized toward their pet projects.

Perhaps leveraging some of the market forces to this benefit would reduce the need for these costs. Perhaps if we opened up construction for new housing, rent increases would slow and evictions could go down naturally? If only.

Good god, this guy cost us $1.5M and counting?