Remote Work Still Dominates With Los Angeles City Workers

Snarled traffic and lunch at Mike’s Deli on First Street were once par for the course for some 48,000 municipal employees clustered around the Civic Center in Downtown Los Angeles.

That all changed when the city went on lockdown five years ago.

A general policy on a return to office remains elusive for the country’s second-largest municipal workforce. And Mayor Karen Bass has said almost nothing publicly about the issue more than a year into her administration, even after California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered state employees back to the office at least three days per week last April and President Trump extinguished remote work altogether for federal employees last month.

“This is still being negotiated. In the meantime, departments are doing their own thing,” said Malaika Billups, who oversees employee relations for L.A. City Administrative Officer Matthew Szabo, the city’s financial advisor. “I imagine something will come out in the next several months.”

Szabo’s office did not offer more detailed information, and a spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass did not comment.

But Billups said Szabo’s staff — a workforce of about 200 analysts, risk managers, grant writers and clerks — are required to work in-person at 200 North Main Street twice a week.

And that’s typical for the city’s professional, non-uniformed workers, Billups said.

“There doesn’t appear to be any sort of mass effort to bring people back five days a week,” Billups told The Real Deal.

Two years into the pandemic, 36 out of 39 city agencies surveyed by the Personnel Department reported that they planned to keep some form of hybrid work policy in place in the coming years, and 13 of those said they would continue offering the option of full-time remote work.

Agencies should aim to offer “permanent flexible options of telecommuting” in the future, the personnel report recommended. It instructed department heads to follow a set of temporary guidelines “until a citywide policy is available.”

Those guidelines have since been removed from the department’s website, and a personnel spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

How this matter settles out in the long-term raises existential questions for L.A., according to Nella McOsker, President & CEO of the Central City Association of Los Angeles, the century-old business league representing about 300 companies, cultural institutions, landlords, and business improvement districts Downtown.

“Without a consistent plan to bring these workers back in-person, we risk further setbacks to the businesses and spaces that make Downtown L.A. special,” McOsker said in a statement to TRD. “What’s critical to emphasize is the scale of the issue.”

That’s because one in three people who work Downtown are in the public sector, according to a report by the DTLA Alliance, a business improvement district. That amounts to about 94,500 workers across all levels of government.

CCA has three lobbyists pushing for the city to develop stronger return-to-work policies, among other issues, according to its public filings. And the DTLA Alliance, for its part, specifically called out remote work as one of the district’s top challenges in its most recent strategic plan, along with public safety and “negative media” about downtown.

But Los Angeles is lagging in government office “busyness,” according to Avison Young and Plaicer.ai’s index, which uses cell phone data to measure how many people are actually visiting office buildings and how long they stay.

Government offices in L.A. are only 45 percent as busy now as they were in 2019, compared to 76 percent on average across 41 U.S. markets the index tracks.

Waking up L.A.’s sleepy downtown is critical, McOsker said.

“A thriving downtown is essential to the success of all Los Angeles—which is why CCA remains committed to advocating for policies that bring people back, revitalize the local economy and ensure downtown’s long-term prosperity.”