While US employers increasingly accept working from home, in Spain, the drive to force people back to the office continues. Why?
New York City is considering what to do with its huge number of vacant offices, as huge numbers of people continue to work from home, three years after the start of the pandemic lockdowns. One potential solution is to repurpose office space for residential use in a city with a chronic housing shortage.
Around 50% of offices in the United States are still vacant, with little likelihood they will ever be filled, despite many companies insisting workers return to nine-to-five routines. At the same time, more and more companies, such as Meta or Microsoft, are abandoning some of their offices, while others, like Amazon, say they have no plans to try to force staff back to them. As a result, empty office buildings are everywhere in most US city centers, and in some, like San Francisco, entire neighborhoods have been turned into ghost towns.
The situation contrasts sharply with Spain, where I live: while the United States has an unemployment rate of 3.4%, and where large numbers of people in some sectors are working from home, here, a dysfunctional labor market means an unemployment rate of 12.87%, with most companies and organizations obsessed with getting people back into the office. It is calculated that…
