Toronto mayor Olivia Chow wants workers back in their offices downtown. As the Toronto Star reported, the move is a bid to bring the financial district “back to life.” Chow has been meeting with the chief executives of major companies, including Canada’s top banks, to figure out how to make it happen and how to, as she told the Star, “make sure our financial district is vibrant.”
As CEOs scheme to force people back to the office, workers are, of course, being talked about as mere spending fodder. Chow should tell them to back off and leave workers alone.
The arguments in favour of forcing workers back into the office four or five days a week are the same throughout North America and much of the world. Having workers return to the office means more bodies in chairs — bodies that occasionally get up to spend money at restaurants, coffee shops, and wherever else an exhausted commuter might lurch to. More bodies in offices downtown also means more transit revenue.
Beyond the bottom line, Chow argues that “having people in a space allows for more interaction, allows for mentorship, allows for a better sense of belonging.” But she also conceded to the Star that forcing employees back to the office “really depends on the job” and that the decision rests with each company. She’s wise not to go all-in on forcing people back to the office.
The corporate class has been whining for months about how hard it is to get workers back into the office. I wonder why. Could it be that workers don’t want to go back to the office? The pandemic changed things — or at least accelerated a trend. For years, workers were stuck at their desks by necessity. Technology changed that by allowing for remote work for many who don’t have to be physically present in the office. The pandemic scaled up the practice and made it stick, while proving the case that remote work is not just viable but better for many.
For every argument in favour of working from the office, fully or hybrid, there’s a counterargument in favor of remote work. Statistics Canada finds that remote workers use the time they don’t have to spend getting ready to head into the office or commuting on resting, getting a healthy amount of sleep, and spending time caring for their kids. How dare they.
The 2022 survey also found that workers saved more than an hour each day when working from home and were happier with their work-life balance, as you’d expect. Who wouldn’t be?
Commuting is hell, and no one likes it. It also takes a toll on city infrastructure and the environment, which is a double-whammy. Dragging yourself out of bed in the dark to dress and prepare to head into the office is also miserable. And workers can be forgiven for preferring not to put themselves through the rigamarole just so they can keep the local sandwich shop in business.
If Chow and the city really care about a revitalized downtown, there are ways to accomplish the goal without forcing workers back to the office in the name of capital, but some of the measures are trickier, require co-operation across orders of government, and will take time.
Better transit is a start: cheap, frequent, widespread, reliable service would encourage people to go downtown. Affordable daycare would help working parents a lot, too. Density in the downtown core and nearby is another winning idea, since it would populate the area, reduce commute times, and perhaps even make housing more affordable. You want people downtown? What if they, hear me out now, were able to live downtown? Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe the city could even throw in some more patio space, you know, as a special treat.
The work of getting people downtown is the work of building an affordable, accessible, inviting city. There’s no shortcut to doing that. You can try to bully or coerce workers back into the office, but that doesn’t solve the structural problem of an uninviting and unaffordable core; it merely treats workers as walking ATMs, half-asleep, feeling guilty for being away from their kids, spitting out cash for crappy chain restaurants and Starbucks coffee shops.
If big-bank CEOs and city officials really think it’s important to “revitalize” the financial district or any downtown district in any major city, they can set to work building better cities. It’s lazy and abusive to cut corners by forcing people back to the office when they can do their job perfectly well from home while enjoying a healthier work-life balance. Workers aren’t grist for the corporate or municipal mill — they’re human beings who deserve better than what their managers, executives, and certain politicians want for them.
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