Employees Get Few Choices in Post-Pandemic RTO Mandates

Firm Management | April 25, 2025

Employees Get Few Choices in Post-Pandemic RTO Mandates

Kastle Systems sees an uptick in the numbers of people entering secure office buildings and parking structures with their electronic badges since President Donald Trump's inauguration.

By Pat Maio
The Orange County Register
(TNS)

Since mid-January, there’s been an uptick nationwide of people heading back to workspaces.

The numbers curated from electronic badges being swiped coincide roughly with Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Jan. 20 and his team’s subsequent mandate that federal workers return to the office five days a week, similar to corporate-led initiatives nationwide.

Kastle Systems’ “Back-to-Work Barometer” measures badge swipes weekly, comparing current occupancy levels with pre-pandemic levels in 10 major cities. The data baseline is February 2020, before COVID-19 closed workplaces globally.

More workers have returned to their place of employment since May 2023, but the pace has bumped up again in recent months, according to data provided by the Virginia-based security company.

The weekly national average occupancy rate of 54.5% reached a post-pandemic high March 5, according to the latest available figures. That’s the highest occupancy rate since March 11, 2020, about a week before the pandemic began, and when the Kastle reported a national average of 92.4%.

In the Los Angeles region, the average occupancy rate was 97% in March 2020, but quickly fell in line with national averages. At 49.3% as of March 12, the occupancy rate is near its post-pandemic peak hit in the past five years and has steadily grown by nearly a third from its 37.6% occupancy rate in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2025.

Commercial brokerages see stabilization in the office market, but the pandemic’s impact continues to linger, despite renewed efforts to get workers to return.

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©2025 MediaNews Group Inc. Visit ocregister.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.

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Comments: 1

David MasonApril 28 2025 at 4:10 pm

We need a good general white collar union. Why exactly do commercial brokerages/the office market seem to be more important than the lives of millions of workers that are impacted by commutes and the degradation upon the human spirit that is "office culture"? Not just this, but the laws around salaried overtime exemption need to be changed/updated in favor of workers. We already know that the pro-RTO arguments are shallow, bogus appeals for why the powerful should be able to hold onto their power. So, my response to that is that better unionization is obviously needed. If Trump cares about RTO he can stop playing so much golf. That goes for all the CEOs.

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