The overwhelming majority of the labor force spent the pandemic working in person. But much of the white-collar class persists in remote or hybrid work more than a year after COVID vaccines were rolled out. At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson astutely likens the implications of urban America avoiding a return to the pre-pandemic workplace to a “cannonball dropped in a lake — an acute phenomenon whose ripples can warp every corner of the labor force.”
Thompson’s predictions seem decent, but they cannot be evaluated without ignoring the elephant in the room: Why haven’t urban workers returned to the office? The pandemic itself has little to do with it.
Thompson points out that Kastle Systems data indicate that office attendance has returned to just one-third of its pre-pandemic average despite a much more pronounced return to pre-pandemic travel and restaurant-going habits.
A cynic might say it’s as simple as a preference for pajamas and a couch rather than cubicles, fluorescent lights, and pleated pants. But the distribution of office entries indicates that specific policy preferences have rendered workers in certain areas of the country — more Democratic areas, specifically — more averse to returning to their physical workplaces.
On the margins, disrupted public transit makes it harder and more expensive to head downtown. Further, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem plaguing the network of businesses in city centers, with white-collar workers less inclined to return to the office when there are fewer options for taking clients out for lunches or coffees and fewer eateries able to stay open without that business.
A bigger problem is crime, perhaps. But what is the biggest? Probably the penalty that blue America is putting on parents during the pandemic.
Nearly two-thirds of the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic were once held by women. It isn’t just the school closures either. Many districts, including Washington, D.C., have reopened but still impose onerous classroom quarantines if anyone gets sick. This requires parents or caregivers to supervise children for multiple weekdays at a moment’s notice. For many mothers, remote or hybrid work is not a perk — it is a necessity for remaining in the labor force at all, thanks to continued pandemic restrictions.
Maybe hybrid work is here to stay. Perhaps, as Thompson posits, that will spell the end of the standardized workweek as we know it across industries. But if we are ever to return to the pre-pandemic norm, the full, permanent reopening of schools will first be necessary.
