Dear Colleagues,
The Health and Safety Committee of your UUP Buffalo Center Chapter has investigated the advantages for allowing alternate work site locations options (telecommuting) to those staff who are able to from a Sustainability viewpoint. This research includes:
- 24 Million tons of global CO2 emissions would be removed if everyone in the world would work from home one day a week.
- 98% of an individual’s carbon footprint comes from commuting (Beño, 2021, The Advantages and Disadvantages of E Working)
- If 40% of Americans worked from home 50% of the time it would reduce oil needs by 280,000,000 barrels and take 9,000,000 cars off the road.
- If you work 45 weeks a year and commute 1 less day a week, you would pick up in excess of one work week of time over a year’s period if your commute time was 30 minutes in each direction. 40 to 45 additional hours a year of avoided commuting time could be dedicated to exercise, improving mental and physical wellbeing and by extension worktime productivity.
- If the university reduced its faculty and staff parking load by 20% each day, 1200 parking spaces could be eliminated and turned back to forest thereby reducing parking lot maintenance costs. So not only would greenhouse gases be reduced by driving fewer cars, but the university could also sequester additional carbon in the trees planted on campus where parking lots stood.
- According to research by Sun Microsystems, Inc., remote workers tend to give back 60% of their commute time in the form of productive work. AT&T also reported that telecommuters worked on average 5 hours more per week than their office-based counterparts.
- Telecommuting increases employee productivity up to 40% based on research conducted by globalworkplaceanalytics.com who mined over 4000 academic research papers on the topic.
- Telecommuters have fewer distractions because there is no group coffee break, team lunch, or water-cooler gossip.
- 78% of employees take sick days when they are not sick, according to the American Management Association. Telecommuters take 63% fewer unscheduled days off. So for an employee base of 6,000; 4,680 people take a day off when they are well. The same company that allows telecommuting would have only 2,946 people take that day off. That’s almost 7 FTE!
Various staff throughout the university “moved mountains” when the COVID Pandemic struck in March of 2020 transitioning the university to remote based operations. Staff have proven for the past 18+ months that the ability to work remotely often resulted in greater productivity by individuals. Meeting platforms such as ZOOM have now become a viable option to having to utilize transportation to attend meetings.
Based on the university’s statement on “Climate Action and Beyond – The University at Buffalo has put in decades of work in making our campus more sustainable and decreasing its greenhouse gas impact. Now the time has come to take bold, big actions in achieving our goal of climate neutrality by 2030.”; the Buffalo Center Chapter calls on the university to consider allowing those able to work remotely the ability to do so.
In Solidarity,
Ken Kern
Chapter President
UUP Buffalo Center