Telecommuters Avoid New York Strike Problems

Posted on December 21, 2005

Newsday reports on the effect of the ongoing transportation strike in New York City, which affects millions of people who commute using public transport. But there is one group that remains unaffected by the strike: telecommuters, many of whom are writers and editors.

Gotta get to work in a transit strike? No problem if you're a telecommuter. Just fire up the laptop in the virtual office and work away.
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With this strike being "the latest in a long series of business interruptions," telecommuting isn't such a "big leap" as it once was for employers, said Gil Gordon, a telecommuting consultant in Monmouth Junction, N.J. "You could argue that to some extent the strike has less effect today than it would have had 10 years ago."
In fact, for some employers, the notion of working remotely is business as usual. "It's second nature," said Steve Silverstein, northeast regional operations director for Deloitte Services LP. Of that firm's 5,000 employees in Manhattan, he said, about 75 percent worked remotely yesterday, either from home, client sites or other Deloitte offices.
After Sept. 11, 2001, when 3,500 staff members were displaced from their lower Manhattan office, many employees adopted the nomadic work style, Silverstein said. All professionals who didn't have laptops were issued ones. And bosses were trained in how to manage remotely.

Of course, the "Work on your laptop at Starbucks" thing only works if your local Starbucks employees made into Manhattan without public transport, which many didn't. And there's nothing sadder for a writer to see than a closed Starbucks.