It’s starting: Employers are asking workers to go back to the office this summer
28 April 2021
It’s starting: Employers are asking workers to go back to the office this summer. Those callbacks are expected to be more common after Labor Day.
Why it matters: Getting back to normal could undo the total work-at-home routine office workers have adopted.
The latest: JPMorgan expects employees back in person — on a rotating basis — by July, per CNBC. Citigroup workers will trickle in then too.
- Bloomberg reports ExxonMobil wants Houston-based employees at desks on a full-time basis by mid-May. (A spokesperson would not comment on the report.)
- Deutsche Bank — along with a lengthy list of others — will let some people work from home some days "in a structured way," as it reopens, its CFO said today.
Context: 21% of the employed worked remotely as of last month — down from the peak (35%) in May 2020, when the government first reported this datapoint.
Our thought bubble, via Axios' Erica Pandey: Even as the back-to-office summer commences, many will stay home, and we’re far from returning to the workplaces we left last March.
- The return approaches all leave wiggle room ("rotating" or "hybrid"). Companies know that many of their employees have grown accustomed to working from home and want the option to keep doing so.
What to watch: "It's relatively easier to be remote when everyone is remote. The challenge is, when people go back, a stigma starts to rear its head," Nela Richardson, economist at payroll processor ADP, told reporters today.
- Who goes back — and is rewarded, advantaged for returning — is a big question, says Richardson.
What's next: Whether the flexibility becomes a worker bargaining chip.
- "Some people will prefer to work from home more or less days" and are prepared to switch employers to do that, Stanford professor Nick Bloom tells Axios.
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.