New York City government agencies have struggled to attract and retain employees in part because of Mayor Adams’ decision to not let them work from home, his top budget adviser acknowledged Monday.
Testifying before the City Council, Jacques Jiha, the director of Adams’ Office of Management and Budget, said the ban on remote work options for municipal employees isn’t the only reason for the city government’s staffing crisis. But he told the Council it is a factor along with other challenges, including a tight labor market and the city’s since-expired COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the municipal workforce.
“If you take all of these things into account, that’s what explains the attrition problem. It’s a major challenge,” Jiha testified at a hearing held by the Council’s Finance Committee.
Last summer, Adams set a strict return-to-work policy for the city’s roughly 300,000 municipal workers that prohibited hybrid schedules of any kind. Though work-from-home policies became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, the mayor argued at the time that rolling them back would help boost the local economy, and said scrapping hybrid options in the public sector set the right tone for the city at large.
However, following pressure from organized labor, Adams’ administration announced a tentative contract deal last month with DC37, the city’s largest public sector union, that vowed to explore allowing some forms of remote work for municipal employees. For now, though, the ban remains in place.
At Monday’s hearing, which was held by the Finance Committee to examine Adams’ proposed $102.7 billion budget for next fiscal year, Jiha said the administration acknowledges there has been a problem in workers leaving the public sector or opting to not take jobs in it because of the prohibition on hybrid schedules.
Jiha was not able to offer a number for how many workers have left city service explicitly because of Adams’ anti-hybrid rule.
Democratic Council members at the hearing seized on Jiha’s testimony as an opportunity to call on the administration to rescind the rule.
“I don’t want the city to be the last one holding on to the return of Monday through Friday, 9 to 5,” said Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, who chairs the Finance Committee. “I think flexible work options will go a long way with attacking the vacancies.”
Government-wide, more than 23,000 budgeted positions are sitting vacant, including at key agencies like the Departments of Social Services and Housing Preservation and Development, according to Jiha. Critical public services like social safety net benefits have been mired in processing delays amid the steep staffing shortages.
Jiha said the administration is actively trying to recruit workers, noting that Adams has personally attended city government job fairs to boost participation.
“We are trying our best to be out there in the communities to tell folks: We have 23,000 vacant positions,” he said.
He also said the administration is seeing some positive signs, like the city government onboarding 17,000 new employees in the first seven months of this fiscal year and losing 16,000 — a net gain of 1,000.
Still, Manhattan Councilwoman Gale Brewer told Jiha she does not believe the administration will get a hand on the staffing gaps unless it scraps the remote-work restriction.
“People will not work for the city if it is not hybrid,” she said.
Comptroller Brad Lander, who testified after Jiha, agreed with Brewer.
“Having a hybrid schedule helps a lot in recruitment. That’s what we’re competing against,” Lander said, referring to the private sector.
Last year, Adams argued hybrid policies are unfair to city employees whose jobs do not allow them to work from home, like cops and firefighters. Last month, Adams said it would be fair to compensate those who are required to work in person “in some way” should a hybrid policy be reimplemented.
But at Monday’s hearing, Jiha said the administration does not expect in-person city employees will get a financial sop under any potential remote-work policy.
The thinning of the municipal ranks has hampered a number of major city agencies.
The Department of Social Services — which has more than 2,100 vacancies — is failing to process more than half of all food stamp applications in a timely fashion, resulting in low-income residents going without the nutrition benefits, sometimes for months on end, as previously reported by the Daily News.
Meantime, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which has more than 400 vacancies, is struggling to ramp up affordable housing production, with Adams’ preliminary management report showing that his administration is falling short of its own construction targets.
Beyond budgeted vacancies, Brooklyn Councilman Lincoln Restler said he’s troubled by proposals in Adams’ budget blueprint to permanently eliminate thousands of vacant positions at nearly all city agencies, including libraries. He argued such cuts will only exacerbate the city’s struggle to deliver services.
“We are failing because of the mayor’s rigid ideological insistence on shrinking the head count of the City of New York,” said Restler, a Democrat who chairs the Council’s Progressive Caucus.
Jiha pushed back against Restler’s argument and reminded him there are thousands of vacant positions that the city is actively trying to fill despite the head count reduction aspirations.
The reason the administration is seeking to slash some jobs boils down to the mayor’s concern about the city’s long-term fiscal health, Jiha said.
“We are in a very difficult situation,” he said, noting that the local migrant crisis is costing the administration about $150 million every month while tax revenues are lower than hoped.
The Council and the mayor must reach an agreement on a budget by July 1.
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens), who opened Monday’s hearing, said she has sympathy for the administration’s fiscal concerns, but signaled the Council won’t let the mayor’s first budget proposal stand.
“The COVID-19 pandemic spotlighted the wide and persisting inequities in our city,” she said. “As we move forward, we cannot underfund and understaff the very agencies that have connected New Yorkers with the essential services and organizations that have helped them withstand this crisis.”
