Good morning. It's Thursday. We'll look at why municipal workers in New York City are quitting. We'll also meet someone who's not rattled by rattlesnakes, on the job or off. |
 | | Daniel Irizarry quit his job as an attorney with the city's Human Rights Commission.Shravya Kag for The New York Times |
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The last time anybody checked, only 8 percent of the people who work for private employers in Manhattan were back in their offices full time. But nearly 100 percent of the municipal work force is back. And there are signs that the municipal work force is less than 100 percent happy about it. |
There's no survey on the happiness factor. But some city workers relish the flexibility that remote work can provide and don't like Mayor Eric Adams's push to bring them back. Some worry about Covid exposure at work. "There was an outbreak at my office," one city employee wrote on Instagram, "and everyone continued as if nothing happened." |
And some see new opportunities — and bigger paychecks — in private-sector jobs when the labor market is as hot as it has been. |
Singly or together, those factors have prompted thousands of city workers to quit, leaving jobs vacant and creating difficulties in delivering basic city services. As of March, the vacancy rate across city government was 7.7 percent, according to data from the Citizens Budget Commission. |
Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, said in a statement that the city's labor shortage was part of a nationwide trend. He said "the city has faced no operational impact to services" from vacancies, "but we are recruiting aggressively for every vacant position." |
New York is unusual in calling all municipal workers to their desks. A national survey by Cisco of hybrid work in government found that 58 percent were working remotely all week long, and 91 percent were satisfied with the arrangement. Just over a quarter said they wanted to work from home every day. |
In New York, turnover in city government is not unusual when a new mayor takes over, as Adams did at the beginning of the year. But it is usually the upper ranks that empty out. The resignations have been more widespread this year. |
"He can't force the big companies to go back into their offices, no matter how much swagger he has," Jeremiah Cedeño, the founder of a group called City Workers for Justice, which fights for remote work options for municipal employees, told me. "The only people he can force back into their offices are city workers." |
Daniel Irizarry quit as a staff attorney with the city's Human Rights Commission in May for a better-paying job. He was disappointed by the mayor's comments about workers needing to be in offices to boost the economy, and worried about the possibility of getting long Covid. |
"It was kind of a slap in the face to say we have to support the economy without regard to people's health concerns," he said. |
Cedeño himself quit at about the same time. He told me that he had been a program coordinator for the city's Human Resources Administration, helping people in shelters find housing. He said me he took a job with a mental health services company that pays $30,000 a year more and is fully remote. |
But is remote work here to stay? Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, told me that the private sector's view of remote work was "fluid." |
"They're not making permanent decisions" about remote work, she said, "whereas in a unionized public sector, today's decisions could well become precedents." She said remote work could be seen as "a new fringe benefit for which management got nothing." |
Prepare for a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon and again in the evening. Temperatures during the day will climb toward the high 80s and will drop to the low 70s at night. |
In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption). |
 | | Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times |
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The 'reptile lady' is a snake protector |
 | | Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times |
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The reptile lady, as people sometimes call Wendy Townsend, was ready for another day at a construction site — this one in Warwick, N.Y. |
She had arrived an hour before the workers who are replacing a water tower. She had put on her hard hat and lifted her snake hook from behind the seat of her pickup truck. There was no need for the brighter-than-bright safety vest she often puts on and zips up — anticipating another hot day, she had worn an orange work shirt. |
Then she did her inspection. |
Her job is to make job sites safe for reptiles like the venomous timber rattlesnake, a threatened species in New York State, even if she has to order the bulldozers to stop while she carries a snake out of the way. |
That might happen later in the day. But in the quiet before people are trudging around in their heavy boots, she wants to see that no snake has nestled overnight in equipment parked on the site. |
Working as a reptile monitor was a career change for Townsend, who is 60 and taught college-level writing courses for 11 years until about five years ago. "That wasn't getting me anywhere," she said. |
 | | Wendy Townsend owns five rock iguanas, including Ava.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times |
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Looking for reptiles on construction sites was appealing because she has looked after reptiles for years — she has five West Indian rock iguanas. She has felt an almost mystical connection with reptiles since childhood, when she bonded with a lizard she encountered "and realized these are my people." |
So, the inspection. She bent down for a look under a box truck where the crew stores its tools. No snakes there. She looked under a skid steer loader, a tractor-like machine. None there, either. She walked the perimeter of the site, which is bounded by yellow rope. |
She said she would spend the rest of the day keeping her eye mainly on ledges on a hill beyond the water tower that a snake could crawl down from. "I would escort the snake," she said. "Usually he's following a scent trail, and you don't want to disrupt that unless he's heading in the direction of moving machinery or a crew member or he's about to hide under a pallet. You want to follow that snake and see that he is safely on the other side of the construction site and on his way, doing what he needs to do, which is follow the females." |
So this isn't about food? |
She works for a subcontractor to construction companies doing work in locations where endangered or threatened species live — timber rattlesnakes are listed as threatened in New York and endangered in New Jersey and Connecticut. For some construction projects, New York State requires a contractor to hire a monitor as a condition of the permits needed to do the work. |
On job sites, she said the reaction to her presence is "always mixed." |
"They all recognize that I have inspector status," she said. "If I see a rattlesnake in harm's way, I put my fist in the air. They stop work until I move it out of the way." |
The No. 1 train I hoped to catch in order to be on time for my dinner date was only three minutes away as I got to the station. Plenty of time, except for one thing: I couldn't unbutton my back pocket to get my MetroCard out of my wallet. |
The more nervous I got about missing the train, the more impossible it became to unbutton the pocket. |
Finally, with time running out, I explained my predicament to a young man who was going into the station. |
After hesitating at first, he bent down and unbuttoned my pocket. I thanked him profusely. |
"That was a first for me," he said. |
"And for me too," I replied as the train pulled into the station. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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