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All 40,000 U.S. employees of International accounting and business services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) who work in client services are free from now on to work at home and live wherever they please, the firm has announced.
The catch: those workers need to be available to come to a central office three days a month, at most, for trainings, team meetings, and meetings with clients, Reuters noted.
“We have learned a ton” during the COVID War “and working virtually, as we think about the evolution of flexibility, is a natural next step,” Yolanda Seals-Coffield, PwC’s deputy chief of human resources, told Reuters.
Accounting giants Deloitte and KPM also have relaxed rules about office time, breaking a long-standing norm among large accounting and consulting firms that workers put in long days at the office.
Another catch: employees who move to locations with a lower cost of living will see their salaries reduced proportionately, Reuters reported.
Despite releasing 40,000 workers to toil remotely, the company has no plans to reduce its office space but said it will use the spaces differently and “in more collaborative ways.”
In June, PwC said it will hire an additional 100,000 workers to help clients report on issues related to diversity and climate.
PwC now employs about 284,000 people, with headquarters in London and a U.S. base in New York City.
TREND FORECAST: For now, a few cash-rich corporations may prop up the commercial real estate market in some locales at a time when investors are avoiding it. However, we maintain our forecast for a commercial real estate bust in many major cities, as we predicted as far back as “Remote Work = Commercial Bust” (2 Jun 2020).
PwC’s decision is only the latest sign confirming another of our forecasts made in articles such as “Corporations Continue to Shed Office Space” (13 Jul 2021): as the shift to working at home becomes the New Abnormal, it will redefine economic ecosystems, especially in urban centers.
Commuters will return to offices, but not in the numbers that can support the pre-2020 economic ecosystems that depended on them.
Commuters buy lunch, gifts, clothes, gadgets, and other items in locales where they work; as workers stay home, downtown stores and restaurants will lose their traditional customer base and gas stations along commuter routes will see business plummet.
At the same time, owners of commercial real estate will face a reckoning as they slash rents to lure a shrinking base of tenants, forcing them to demand property tax concessions from cities that will struggle even more to maintain police, fire, and public works infrastructures.
The crash in property values will, in turn, crash city budgets, leaving cities unable to fund past levels of services in police protection, firefighting, education, and trash collection, among others. (New York City gained 40 percent of its pre-2020 revenues through property taxes.)