The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and NJ Transit were unable to resolve a dispute over wages and the union struck at 12:01 a.m., Friday morning. The job action affected about 350,000 commuters across the state. It was the first strike by the union since 1983.
The strike is prompting many commuters to work from home. It might seem like deja vu for many of them, who were forced to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020 and kept many workers home for months afterward.
“Professionals and managers can all work from home for a few days so can more easily ride out transit strikes and are less impacted,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a leading researcher on work-from-home policies.
Bloom believes the strike will have unintended consequences for the union.
“Working from home has definitely reduced the power of transport strikes and shifted the burden increasingly to front-line workers,” said Bloom. “Transit workers have less bargaining power. The most impacted folks will be other essential frontline and service workers that need to work in person, so increasingly they will be the victims and the leverage for transit strikes. I don’t see this sitting too well politically – nobody is going to be as in favor of strikes that hit lower-paid workers the hardest.”
New Jersey has been at the forefront from working from home since the onset of the pandemic. The number of New Jerseyans working from home in 2021 more than quadrupled from pre-pandemic levels, a greater share of people working from home than 43 states, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The pandemic accelerated everyone’s comfort level with, and technological ability to, work from home,” said Dr. Terri Kurtzberg, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, whose areas of expertise include negotiation strategies and tactics, electronic communication and distraction, virtual work, and disability employment. “This ability helps to minimize random disruptions like the failure to be able to commute to work on a given day. People can certainly piece together a process and minimize disruption for a short amount of time without changing anything fundamental about how work gets done. But if days swing into weeks or months, then companies may have to decide if they want to embrace the remote option or reject it.”
She added that the impact on local economies–from the lunch rush at the local deli to the value of real estate–will also depend on the length of time. “A few days probably won’t have much impact,” added Dr. Kurtzberg.
A New Jersey Monitor story in 2022 said that in 2021, 22% of New Jersey workers ages 16 and older worked remotely, compared with just 5% in 2019, when the Census Bureau last released comparable American Community Survey estimates.
At the same time, public transportation use slid in New Jersey to 6% in 2021 from 6% in 2019. The share of New Jerseyans commuting to work by car dropped to 67% in 2021 from 79% in 2019.
New Jerseyans are opting to work from home because many of them have white-collar jobs that lend themselves for that work situation. They are also working from home to avoid the nation’s longest travel time to work. Commuters in the New-York-Newark-Jersey City metropolitan area had the longest travel time to work in the nation in 2019 at 38 minutes, according to a Census Bureau, compared with the national average of 25 minutes.
When people choose to work from home, there is little change in their work behavior, according to one finding. David Powell, president of Prodoscore said the firm’s data revealed that if an employee was a high-level producer at the office, they’ll be productive at home; if an employee lacked motivation at the office, they’ll work the same way at home. “After evaluating over 105 million data points from 30,000 U.S.-based Prodoscore users, we discovered a 5% increase in productivity during the pandemic work from home period,” he said in a Forbes story.
Some management experts aren’t so sure. While conceding that working from home has its advantages, Dr. Benjamin B. Dunford, professor of management at Purdue University’s Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, said there are drawbacks. “Without regular in-person interactions, two key pitfalls tend to arise: Team members are less likely to voice concerns or confront inevitable grievances, which, if left unresolved, can fester and undermine teamwork,” he said in comments he shared with Newsweek magazine in January. “There is a heightened risk of miscommunication and misunderstanding since much of the communication occurs via low bandwidth emails, chats, and texts rather than face-to-face. These issues often lead to unresolved conflicts and misaligned expectations, hindering the team’s ability to engage in healthy, productive discussions and effectively navigate disagreements.”
