Workers In Washington, D.C., Region Likely To Work From Home Until Next Summer

НОВОРОССИЯ.RU
16 Сен 2020, 00:45

Enlarge this image

An almost empty Metro station is seen in Washington, D.C., on July 21. The region’s employers worry about the safety of workers using the transit system during the pandemic.

Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images

hide caption

toggle caption

Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images

The Coronavirus Crisis
Get A Comfortable Chair: Permanent Work From Home Is Coming

Major tech companies such as Google and Facebook have extended their employee work-from-home policies to next summer; Amazon is allowing employees who can work from home to do so until January. Other companies including Twitter have decided employees will telework permanently. Nationwide Insurance decided to transition to a permanent hybrid work model.

JPMorgan Chase executives notified trading and sales workers that they should plan on returning to their offices by Sept. 21. Goldman Sachs informed employees it would start letting them back into the offices over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, states are continuing to slowly reopen their economies. Governors across the nation have united together to create reopening plans that work best for their economies. The West Coast reopening alliance includes: California, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada and Oregon. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo also developed plans with neighboring states.

Coronavirus Live Updates
Google Employees Can Work From Home Until July 2021

Some companies in the Washington, D.C., region that prepared to bring back workers after Labor Day decided against it amid new cases and employees’ worries. The report shows smaller companies, with less than 25 workers, are more likely to resume normal on-site operations sooner.

«The pandemic is likely to have long-lasting impacts on how employees commute to their worksites, but the full impacts may not be felt for many months,» according to the survey.

Many of the region’s employers do not intend to regularly test employees for the coronavirus, but they said they would if the tests were free. And 40% of employers are not hopeful that mandatory mask policies on the area’s transit system will be enforced.

Adedayo Akala is an intern on the NPR Business Desk.