JPMorgan Chase is a bank identified in The Bob Zadek Show as one of three major banks operating in Manhattan. It appears in the program’s discussion of remote work and the future of cities, not as a subject in its own right but as an example of the office-space economics that shape urban central business districts.
The Manhattan office footprint
In the episode on the future of cities, guest Brent Orrell named JPMorgan Chase while describing the real-estate burden carried by large employers in Manhattan. He said there are three major banks operating in Manhattan — Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, and one other whose name he could not at that moment recall — and that these businesses in total employ 20,000 people who were coming into the city every single day The Future of Cities (2020). Those 20,000 people, Orrell said, have to be put into office space amounting to about 10 million square feet, which he characterized as some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
The figure is offered as an instance rather than an audit: Orrell introduced it with the caveat that it was just one example, and the third bank went unnamed. The excerpt does not state which of the three banks employs how many of the 20,000, nor how the 10 million square feet is divided among them. JPMorgan Chase’s role in the passage is to stand for the class of large Manhattan employers whose commuting populations and leased space make telecommuting economically attractive.
The economics of moving work out of the city
Orrell drew from that footprint a prediction about employer behavior. He said employers would reason that they can get better productivity out of staff, reduce risk to those staff and their health and well-being, and cut back on the costs associated with operating those offices. He called those enormous economic incentives for businesses to support and sustain the move to telecommuting The Future of Cities (2020).
The downstream consequence Orrell identified is that removing some of those employees from central business districts has huge implications for the smaller businesses that operate underneath the larger ones to support their operations. He described the potential downstream effects of telecommuting as really, really significant for the life and health of cities. JPMorgan Chase sits inside that chain of reasoning only as one of the employers whose departure from daily commuting would ripple outward to the businesses that serve its workforce.
Telecommuting as a pre-existing trend
Orrell was careful to say that COVID did not create telecommuting. He described it as a rising trend in American business life and economic life for the last 10, 15 years, and said COVID provided an accelerant to drive that change much faster and to open up possibilities for many more people than would have been thought of before The Future of Cities (2020).
He also described a long-standing employer suspicion of remote work, recalling something he had read on Twitter or Facebook or someplace like that to the effect that if you are working at home, you are not working. In his account, that sentiment expressed employers’ concern that one reason they want people in the office is so they can keep an eye on them and make sure they are being productive. What the crisis was showing, he said, is that people can be as or more productive working from home — a finding he expected to weigh heavily on employers’ minds going forward, especially for tasks that do not require daily face-to-face interaction with co-workers or clients.
Corporate culture and new employees
Orrell identified a complication alongside the cost case. He said it is very difficult to build a corporate culture if people are not actually working in the same place, and he distinguished acclimating new employees from working with existing ones. Existing employees, in his account, know what the business is about and know its values and priorities, and they operate accordingly. New people, and especially younger workers coming into the system, have not had the benefit of that experience or of the close interpersonal contact that comes from working in the same location The Future of Cities (2020).
That caveat qualifies rather than cancels the real-estate argument. Orrell presented the economics as the factor he thought would really drive change in the degree to which firms move to and stay with telecommuting, with culture and onboarding as the counterweight.
Bob Zadek’s framing
Bob Zadek opened the segment by distinguishing kinds of office work. He said that when he refers to office workers he does not mean people doing bureaucratic tasks, and he pointed to Silicon Valley and the tech industry as examples of highly creative, highly innovative, very collaborative work that almost requires human density and seems to require physical proximity The Future of Cities (2020).
He then separated that category from workers who are in offices simply because that is where it has always been, and asked Orrell to focus on the latter. Zadek described the pandemic as a force-fed experience of working from home, one that severs the relationship between where you live and where you work to some degree. He framed working from home, where it works, as a win-win for employer and employee — cheaper for the employer, and pleasant and productive for the worker — and asked Orrell what he saw as the possibility, if not the probability, that this would profoundly affect cities. The question is Zadek’s; the real-estate figures and the prediction about employer incentives are Orrell’s.
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts, the discussion of the future of cities, touches JPMorgan Chase; the excerpts show no development in the show’s treatment of the bank across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe JPMorgan Chase’s business, size, history, leadership, or legal exposure, and they do not say which state Manhattan is in or name the third bank Orrell could not recall. They give no breakdown of the 20,000 employees or the 10 million square feet among the three banks, and no date for the figures. Nothing in the excerpts indicates that JPMorgan Chase was discussed on any other episode of the program.