yes, exactly. Aren't we ALL in this effort of getting Portland back on it's feet? If you're not here to help, step aside to make room for someone who is.
Could he not have negotiated a phased return to the office? Phased over time and as a proportion of working time. This would be incentivized and staying at home disincentivized. No promotion for home-workers. Travel allowances for office workers? Home-working needs to be defined ultimately as anti-civic in its essence. We are talking about choice and consequence of choice which has to be framed. Downtown empty streets and shops are a consequence.
Collective bargaining makes a lot of sense to me in the private sector. After seeing the results of many years of collective bargaining in the public sector, I've become more skeptical of its utility there.
i am a retired professional nonprofit fundraising manager who spent 49 years getting up early five to six days a week to spend 50-60 hours a week at my office or out visiting donors in their homes or workplaces. i cannot in a million years fathom how I would have been at all effective if I had phoned it in by working at home as so many people argue is a more productive way of conducting their employment. I have no sympathy for those who resist going to their workplace and interacting with their colleagues in a manner they cannot accomplish working from home.
Do they really believe remote work opportunities are essential for equity? The person who made that comment should be asked to explain how working from home is an equity issue. Willamette Week wrote an article on this topic last year or maybe 2024 and quoted similar excuses. One city employee said "it's not our job to help downtown recover", another said "while working in-person, we are subjected to non stop micro aggressions by managers". I thought to myself "Well, if downtown does not recover, what will happed to City revenue?" After reading the article, I assumed the real power broker in city hall is the Union. My view would be to bring them back to the office and let them decide if they want to come back to work or go on strike. If they want to strike, let them. Might be a good way to determine what percent of city workers perform essential work. The list might be useful while trying the balance the budget.
The mayor missed his big opportunity to get workers back downtown when they were negotiating the city contract shortly after he was sworn in. Management should have declared that as an interest at the bargaining table. It would have elevated the discussion since working conditions are a mandatory subject of bargaining and given his team an opportunity to do some creative work around putting language in the contract that addressed the problem.
Most people want to go back to work so they can be with coworkers in person which is much healthier and fun that being siloed at home. The public unions leaders are likely misrepresenting their workers, negotiating for power, rather than substance. The mayor should try again, keep at it, as persistence will win the day in getting people to give up habits that are no longer necessary or healthy. Mayor Wilson has grit, and will circle back and keep at those things which elude him the first time around. A Republican governor could do alot to change the culture in Portland which is sleepy and lazy and often distracted. Stay focused and keep returning to the basics. Strengthen criminal justice and the mental health system, keep up with sheltering people if they need it, and please, someone get rid of the policy of legalizing needle distribution and drug paraphenalia distribution. We don't have to fight. We just need to persist and try harder.
The one party system in Oregon is a debacle just as it is in Oklahoma. Unfortunately we don't have a Republican Party that can get away from the culture wars or disavow MAGA. If we did, it would be healthy reality check on the über progressives and their incompetence that have dominated Portlandia for the last 15 years.
These workers want to change the parameters of their job descriptions after the fact of them accepting their jobs with said jobs having specific job descriptions at the time of their hiring. Try that in a personal relationship. "Yes, darling, I know I promised to be faithful when I married you, but I've decided I want to have sex with other people." See how that works out for you.
Having worked for the city for a long a long time, I can’t imagine not coming to work and collaborating with colleagues. Mayor Wilson should revisit his decision and this issue.
"remote work is essential for "equity"? Why yes it is because then we will see who is "equally" qualified" to do the job. This definitely would leave out race. Oh wait, the person who said that didn't know this? Oh well, think before you speak.
Nice that Allan is talking about something most of us have known for years...the city charter wasn't a cure-all (in fact, it created the mess we witness today and put the socialists in the driver's seat); and the city's "jobs for life" bureaucracy is only growing more opaque under the charter's "professionalize 'em" fantasy: a city administrator and sub-administrators, and bigger silos with no effective electoral supervision--the real lesson of the "missing" $110-million.
Fixing the charter is the Great Unspoken in this town's media (pirate and otherwise)...mindless that it was the quintessential "work from home" product during Covid.
Its core leadership (about half the commission seemed to have better things to do) later displayed their back-channel (to hell with public meeting laws) in the "peacock" texts kerfluffle.
Until this so-called "Charter Reform" is repealed and replaced with something more equitable, all of our moaning and groaning about the egregious behavior of our city's politicians and our public employees is simply farting in the wind.
The doom-loop has been effectively institutionalized.
Thank you, Allan, for getting to this topic. I have been droning on about this for the last 3-4 years. It started, oddly enough, when casually meeting a local executive with Urban Renaissance Group and my thoughts turned to his Press Blocks project. Being a Realtor and Goose Hollow neighbor, I had serious concerns about their failure (to date) to get tenants in the first phase tower of the project and wondered what their team (or contract leasing agents) were doing to lure tenants to it. Remember, that tower was completed before COVID and has remained largely empty ever since - so they were having vacancy problems well before COVID chased City and private company employees out of the core area. But, in thinking about this, it occurred to me that a simple, but controversial solution to this flight, was to: 1) mandate a required return of City employees to downtown buildings and 2) set policy that City contracts would exclusively favor companies with offices in the downtown area. I suggested that this to him and it fell on deaf ears. (Well, his company doesn't control the City, so that's fair. But, his company could certainly have approached the City to try and arrange this.) Such local municipal action would clearly have benefited property owners, like them, in the core area. Instead, inaction will beget a woeful economic hardship to the area for the next 7-10 years.
Meantime, this became an issue again while doing development research for the benefit of RE investment clients. Pre-COVID, it was a simple matter to visit the City's Permitting and Development offices on SW 4th, take a number and await one's turn to meet and talk with various officials in zoning, plans examination and PBOT. Usually a 1 to 1.5 hour stint, meeting as many as 3-4 departments could satisfactorily provide the development information needed to ascertain the maximum potential of a subject property. However, with the COVID outbreak, as soon as these employees went home to work, all that great customer service vanished. One could never get all answers in one meeting event, but instead had to parcel out this investigation over multiple 15 minute Microsoft Teams (like Zoom) calls. Precisely 15 minutes and even then, not really. Because calls are always late and the official pushes to end before the 15 minute allotted time, to allegedly prepare for the next call in his schedule. And these were never on the day you sought the information - it had to be pre-scheduled usually out two weeks. So on one project, I had to set up 4 separate meetings, over 4 separate dates over a months time, in order to get the information I would have gotten in person, in one day. Yep, talk about efficiency. Talk about THE CITY THAT WORKS - AT HOME!
So, yes this is a laughable situation. It is insane that an executive human resources manager (now gone) would stupidly agree to make working from home a union-lead benefit. He should have been pilloried. Even more appalling is that what was extended to employees as a temporary benefit is now considered a worker's right - codified in their union contract terms.
Again, giving this a lot of thought, I do conclude that the present situation, now completely out of control, is the result of allowing bureaucrats to provide themselves self-governing management. In simple terms, it is the inmates running the asylum. Given the power to manage themselves without independent oversight, they do (and will) choose practices that make their job as least-demanding as possible. These same managers who maintain programs to denigrate customer service to the public are the same ones that arbitrarily choose when to perform tasks commensurate with city code. Parking enforcement and operations, by example, never enforces all parking code, for management has instructed enforcement officers to concentrate on only a few key violations (overtime mainly) and ignore a dozen or more other code infractions. Why? Simply put, forget performing duty commensurate with the law or developing extra needed revenue or even protecting the safety of citizens (like 6 foot high vehicles parked at intersections blocking on-coming traffic view), all that is too much work for the employees, so management instructs them to work less hard. I know this having discussed it with a senior official several year ago. They don't care what their work duty is as proscribed by city code, they only care about how to make it easy on themselves. And that, alas, is what we have here - collectively the City employees fight for their right to work remotely, provide inferior customer service, while insuring they earn income away from the prying eyes of a public dubious about the efforts they allege to make. Pretty good scam, I say.
yes, exactly. Aren't we ALL in this effort of getting Portland back on it's feet? If you're not here to help, step aside to make room for someone who is.
Could he not have negotiated a phased return to the office? Phased over time and as a proportion of working time. This would be incentivized and staying at home disincentivized. No promotion for home-workers. Travel allowances for office workers? Home-working needs to be defined ultimately as anti-civic in its essence. We are talking about choice and consequence of choice which has to be framed. Downtown empty streets and shops are a consequence.
Collective bargaining gives both sides plenty of carrots and sticks. Management didn’t use either.
Collective bargaining makes a lot of sense to me in the private sector. After seeing the results of many years of collective bargaining in the public sector, I've become more skeptical of its utility there.
I am not an insider.i just wanted to express some thoughts as a thinking taxpayer.
i am a retired professional nonprofit fundraising manager who spent 49 years getting up early five to six days a week to spend 50-60 hours a week at my office or out visiting donors in their homes or workplaces. i cannot in a million years fathom how I would have been at all effective if I had phoned it in by working at home as so many people argue is a more productive way of conducting their employment. I have no sympathy for those who resist going to their workplace and interacting with their colleagues in a manner they cannot accomplish working from home.
Those city workers best watch out, or their jobs will be replaced with AI.
It doesn’t take much to create a robot to lean on a shovel.
Do they really believe remote work opportunities are essential for equity? The person who made that comment should be asked to explain how working from home is an equity issue. Willamette Week wrote an article on this topic last year or maybe 2024 and quoted similar excuses. One city employee said "it's not our job to help downtown recover", another said "while working in-person, we are subjected to non stop micro aggressions by managers". I thought to myself "Well, if downtown does not recover, what will happed to City revenue?" After reading the article, I assumed the real power broker in city hall is the Union. My view would be to bring them back to the office and let them decide if they want to come back to work or go on strike. If they want to strike, let them. Might be a good way to determine what percent of city workers perform essential work. The list might be useful while trying the balance the budget.
The mayor missed his big opportunity to get workers back downtown when they were negotiating the city contract shortly after he was sworn in. Management should have declared that as an interest at the bargaining table. It would have elevated the discussion since working conditions are a mandatory subject of bargaining and given his team an opportunity to do some creative work around putting language in the contract that addressed the problem.
Most people want to go back to work so they can be with coworkers in person which is much healthier and fun that being siloed at home. The public unions leaders are likely misrepresenting their workers, negotiating for power, rather than substance. The mayor should try again, keep at it, as persistence will win the day in getting people to give up habits that are no longer necessary or healthy. Mayor Wilson has grit, and will circle back and keep at those things which elude him the first time around. A Republican governor could do alot to change the culture in Portland which is sleepy and lazy and often distracted. Stay focused and keep returning to the basics. Strengthen criminal justice and the mental health system, keep up with sheltering people if they need it, and please, someone get rid of the policy of legalizing needle distribution and drug paraphenalia distribution. We don't have to fight. We just need to persist and try harder.
The one party system in Oregon is a debacle just as it is in Oklahoma. Unfortunately we don't have a Republican Party that can get away from the culture wars or disavow MAGA. If we did, it would be healthy reality check on the über progressives and their incompetence that have dominated Portlandia for the last 15 years.
I hope this moves the mayor to rethink his decision.
These workers want to change the parameters of their job descriptions after the fact of them accepting their jobs with said jobs having specific job descriptions at the time of their hiring. Try that in a personal relationship. "Yes, darling, I know I promised to be faithful when I married you, but I've decided I want to have sex with other people." See how that works out for you.
Having worked for the city for a long a long time, I can’t imagine not coming to work and collaborating with colleagues. Mayor Wilson should revisit his decision and this issue.
"remote work is essential for "equity"? Why yes it is because then we will see who is "equally" qualified" to do the job. This definitely would leave out race. Oh wait, the person who said that didn't know this? Oh well, think before you speak.
Nice that Allan is talking about something most of us have known for years...the city charter wasn't a cure-all (in fact, it created the mess we witness today and put the socialists in the driver's seat); and the city's "jobs for life" bureaucracy is only growing more opaque under the charter's "professionalize 'em" fantasy: a city administrator and sub-administrators, and bigger silos with no effective electoral supervision--the real lesson of the "missing" $110-million.
Fixing the charter is the Great Unspoken in this town's media (pirate and otherwise)...mindless that it was the quintessential "work from home" product during Covid.
Its core leadership (about half the commission seemed to have better things to do) later displayed their back-channel (to hell with public meeting laws) in the "peacock" texts kerfluffle.
You get what you don't pay attention to...
Until this so-called "Charter Reform" is repealed and replaced with something more equitable, all of our moaning and groaning about the egregious behavior of our city's politicians and our public employees is simply farting in the wind.
The doom-loop has been effectively institutionalized.
Best article yet...spot on Alan
Thank you, Allan, for getting to this topic. I have been droning on about this for the last 3-4 years. It started, oddly enough, when casually meeting a local executive with Urban Renaissance Group and my thoughts turned to his Press Blocks project. Being a Realtor and Goose Hollow neighbor, I had serious concerns about their failure (to date) to get tenants in the first phase tower of the project and wondered what their team (or contract leasing agents) were doing to lure tenants to it. Remember, that tower was completed before COVID and has remained largely empty ever since - so they were having vacancy problems well before COVID chased City and private company employees out of the core area. But, in thinking about this, it occurred to me that a simple, but controversial solution to this flight, was to: 1) mandate a required return of City employees to downtown buildings and 2) set policy that City contracts would exclusively favor companies with offices in the downtown area. I suggested that this to him and it fell on deaf ears. (Well, his company doesn't control the City, so that's fair. But, his company could certainly have approached the City to try and arrange this.) Such local municipal action would clearly have benefited property owners, like them, in the core area. Instead, inaction will beget a woeful economic hardship to the area for the next 7-10 years.
Meantime, this became an issue again while doing development research for the benefit of RE investment clients. Pre-COVID, it was a simple matter to visit the City's Permitting and Development offices on SW 4th, take a number and await one's turn to meet and talk with various officials in zoning, plans examination and PBOT. Usually a 1 to 1.5 hour stint, meeting as many as 3-4 departments could satisfactorily provide the development information needed to ascertain the maximum potential of a subject property. However, with the COVID outbreak, as soon as these employees went home to work, all that great customer service vanished. One could never get all answers in one meeting event, but instead had to parcel out this investigation over multiple 15 minute Microsoft Teams (like Zoom) calls. Precisely 15 minutes and even then, not really. Because calls are always late and the official pushes to end before the 15 minute allotted time, to allegedly prepare for the next call in his schedule. And these were never on the day you sought the information - it had to be pre-scheduled usually out two weeks. So on one project, I had to set up 4 separate meetings, over 4 separate dates over a months time, in order to get the information I would have gotten in person, in one day. Yep, talk about efficiency. Talk about THE CITY THAT WORKS - AT HOME!
So, yes this is a laughable situation. It is insane that an executive human resources manager (now gone) would stupidly agree to make working from home a union-lead benefit. He should have been pilloried. Even more appalling is that what was extended to employees as a temporary benefit is now considered a worker's right - codified in their union contract terms.
Again, giving this a lot of thought, I do conclude that the present situation, now completely out of control, is the result of allowing bureaucrats to provide themselves self-governing management. In simple terms, it is the inmates running the asylum. Given the power to manage themselves without independent oversight, they do (and will) choose practices that make their job as least-demanding as possible. These same managers who maintain programs to denigrate customer service to the public are the same ones that arbitrarily choose when to perform tasks commensurate with city code. Parking enforcement and operations, by example, never enforces all parking code, for management has instructed enforcement officers to concentrate on only a few key violations (overtime mainly) and ignore a dozen or more other code infractions. Why? Simply put, forget performing duty commensurate with the law or developing extra needed revenue or even protecting the safety of citizens (like 6 foot high vehicles parked at intersections blocking on-coming traffic view), all that is too much work for the employees, so management instructs them to work less hard. I know this having discussed it with a senior official several year ago. They don't care what their work duty is as proscribed by city code, they only care about how to make it easy on themselves. And that, alas, is what we have here - collectively the City employees fight for their right to work remotely, provide inferior customer service, while insuring they earn income away from the prying eyes of a public dubious about the efforts they allege to make. Pretty good scam, I say.