OPB Reporting on Portland Public Employees Working From Home

I lived long enough in the City of Portland to chuckle at the official slogan painted on the municipality’s fleet of vehicles. It says right on their doors, “The City That Works.” Long before COVID policies left city offices mostly empty, that slogan came with a tinge of irony to passers by. Yesterday, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on workers in the city that works questioning whether they should be required to physically show up at the office.

Given the dearth of local Oregon reporting, I generally appreciate OPB. That’s why I go to their website daily. However, this instance seemed to highlight the bias one finds there in a way that makes it worth writing about. OPB seemed to be intentionally providing an uncritical voice to city employees rather than doing justice to the issue.

One thing that usually provides convincing evidence to progressive readers is the demonstration of disparate impact on some form of identity. OPB tripped over some basic statistical reporting to demonstrate this disproportionately impacts women:

According to city data, about 54% of all city staff currently work in person. After the April mandate goes into effect, that number is anticipated to increase to 64%.

It will likely disproportionately affect female employees. Currently, 41% of all employees who work in person are male, while only 11% of people working in person are women.

The percentages of women and men should sum up to 1. If 41% of the people who work in person are male, then 59% should be female. So, why did OPB go on to say that’s 11%?

This being the City of Portland, perhaps the source of those statistics allowed for more than binary options sex reporting. If so, the trendy alternative categories should be reported as well, though that would be a rather high rate of dysphoria.

Worse, citing a statistic like that without attempting to control for differences in distribution across job classifications is deceptive. Blue-collar workers tend to physically do their jobs at a specific location. If those city employees that work with their hands are more likely to be male and office workers are more likely to be female, then this may just correlate to college attendance rates.

Since the mandate is on managers, you’d want to know the distribution of the sexes in managerial roles. That a majority of managers in Portland city government are women is not a crazy possibility. Verifying that would enhance a more direct statistical means of assessing a disparate impact.

Instead, the numbers are dropped for our imaginations to conjure up images of mothers stuck with the responsibilities of raising kids while trying to hold down a job. Portland’s fertility rate is too low to make that assumption.

Another troubling aspect of this reporting is the treatment of the primary fact in question. Does populating an office increase productivity? OPB just quotes an exchange between a city councilor and a manager who will be required to work in the office.

Committee members echoed employees’ concerns. Councilor Jamie Dunphy asked Human Resources Director Tracy Warren if the decision to mandate in-person work was based in any data on remote work leading to poor productivity. She said it was not.

Why not ask the Mayor? Why not ask an operations manager? Human resource managers tend to know very little about human resources. Why not google around for research on the topic that might have influenced Mayor Wilson’s policy decision? Instead, OPB is just reporting on questions employees and councilors are raising. I haven’t seen OPB report on whether the policy itself is questionable.

OPB does do that. However, it tends to only happen when progressives are asking the questions.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.