Good morning. Today is Thursday. We’ll look at why city workers in New York City quit. We will also meet someone who is not bothered by rattlesnakes, whether at work or at work.
The last time someone checked, only 8% of people working for private companies in Manhattan returned to their offices full-time. But nearly 100% of the city’s workforce has returned. And there are signs that the city’s workforce isn’t 100% happy about that.
There is no survey on happiness factor. But some city workers like the flexibility remote work can provide and don’t like Mayor Eric Adams’ push to bring them back. Some worry about being exposed to Covid in the workplace. “There was an outbreak at my office,” a city employee wrote on Instagram“And people carry on as if nothing happened.”
And some see new opportunities – and bigger wages – in private-sector jobs while the labor market remains as hot as ever.
Single or together, those factors have has pushed thousands of city workers to quit, vacating jobs and making it difficult to provide basic city services. As of March, the vacancy rate in the city government was 7.7%, according to data from the Citizens Budget Committee.
Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, said in a statement that the city’s labor shortages are part of a nationwide trend. “The city is not facing an operational impact on services” from vacancies, he said, “but we are hiring aggressively for every open position.”
New York is unusual in calling all city workers to their desks. A Cisco national survey of combined work in government found that 58% are working remotely all week and 91% are satisfied with the arrangement. Just over a quarter said they wanted to work from home every day.
In New York, turnover in city government is not uncommon when a new mayor takes over, as Adams did earlier in the year. But it is usually the upper level vacated. Resignations have been more common this year.
“He can’t force big companies back into their offices, no matter how cocky he is,” said Jeremiah Cedeño, founder of a group called City Workers for Justice, which fights for teleworking options for city employees, say me. “The only people he can force back into their offices are city workers.”
Daniel Irizarry quit his job as a staff attorney for the city’s Human Rights Commission in May for a better paying job. He was frustrated by the mayor’s comments about the need for workers to be in offices to boost the economy, and worried about the long-term viability of Covid.
“It’s a slap in the face to say we have to support the economy without caring about people’s health,” he said.
Cedeño himself gave up at the same time. He told me that he had been a program coordinator for the city’s Human Resources Administration, helping people in shelters find housing. He told me that he took a job at a mental health services company that paid more than $30,000 a year and was completely remote.
But is remote work here to stay? Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, told me that the private sector’s view of remote work is “flexible.”
“They don’t make long-term decisions” about remote work, she said, “while in a united union sector, today’s decisions most likely set precedent.” She says remote work can be seen as “a new fringe benefit that management gets nothing from.”
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‘Reptile Lady’ is the guardian of snakes
The Reptile Woman, as people sometimes call Wendy Townsend, is getting ready for another day at a construction site – this day in Warwick, NY
She arrived an hour before workers were replacing a water tower. She put on her hard hat and lifted the snake hook from the back of her pickup’s seat. No need for a brighter safety vest than she normally puts it on and zips it up – anticipating another hot day, she donned an orange business shirt.
Then she checked her out.
Her job is to make work sites safe for reptiles like the venomous wood rattlesnake, an endangered species in New York State, even as she has to order the bulldozer to stop. while she carried a snake out of the way.
That could happen later in the day. But in the quiet before everyone was trudging on their heavy boots, she wanted to see that there were no snakes nestled overnight in the equipment perched on the site.
Working as a reptile tracker was a career change for Townsend, who is 60 years old and taught college-level writing courses for 11 years until about five years ago. “That doesn’t get me anywhere,” she said.
Seeing Because Reptiles on construction sites were fascinating because she looked after reptile for many years – she has five West Indian rock iguanas. She has felt an almost mystical connection to reptiles since she was a child, when she befriended a lizard she met “and realized this was my man”.
So the test. She stooped to see underneath a van where the crew kept their tools. There are no snakes there. She looked under a skid steer, a tractor-like machine. Not there, nor. She walks the perimeter of the site, surrounded by a yellow rope.
She said she would spend the rest of the day observing mainly the ledges on the hill outside the water tower that a snake might crawl down. “I will escort the snake,” she said. “Usually he’s following a scent trail, and you don’t want to disrupt that unless he’s following the movement of machinery or a crew member or he’s about to hide under a pallet. You want to track that snake and see that he’s safe on the other side of the construction site and on his way, doing what he needs to do, which is watching the females.”
So this isn’t about the food?
“No,” she said.
She works for a subcontractor for construction companies that work in places where endangered or threatened species – the wood rattlesnake is listed as threatened in New York and endangered. strains in New Jersey and Connecticut. For some construction projects, the State of New York requires the contractor to hire a supervisor as a condition of the permits necessary to perform the work.
On job sites, she says the reaction to her presence has been “always mixed.”
“They all recognized that I had inspector status,” she said. “If I see a harmful rattlesnake, I throw my fist in the air. They stopped the work until I moved it out of the way.”
METROPOLITAN . Diary
Opened the button
Dear Diary:
Train #1, which I was hoping to catch to make it on time for my dinner, was only three minutes away from my arrival at the station. Plenty of time, except for one thing: I can’t open my back pocket to get my MetroCard out of my wallet.
The more I worried about missing the train, the more I couldn’t unbutton my bag.
Finally, with time running out, I explained my predicament to a young man about to enter the station.
After hesitating at first, he bent down and unbuttoned my pocket. I thank him very much.
“It was a first for me,” he said.
“And for me too,” I replied as the train entered the station.
– Vincent Giangreco
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and Read more Metropolitan Diary here.
So glad we can get together here. See you tomorrow. – JB
PS This is for today Small crosswords and Spell Bee. You can find all our quizzes here.
Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
