Daniel Lurie’s corporate ‘partners’ need to get serious, put butts in seats
The mayor is cajoling reluctant city workers back to their municipal cubicles. Now he needs to push his friends in the corporate world to do the same.
Editor-at-large, The San Francisco Standard
Published May 05, 2025 • 6:00am
No mayor in modern times has a closer relationship with the private sector than Daniel Lurie. He nurtured it at his former job as a nonprofit funder and also as ringleader of the Super Bowl-supporting Bay Area Host Committee. And now he’s the driving force behind various efforts to raise money from businesspeople, including the Partnership for San Francisco, a consortium of 30 CEOs and executives providing advice and support to his efforts to remake the city; the San Francisco Downtown Development Corp., which aims to fund revitalization projects; and a still-nascent effort to get wealthy donors to pay for shelter beds.
Now Lurie needs to deliver a simple message to his corporate pals: Do as I’ve already done, and mandate that your employees be back in the office four days a week. And those recalcitrant business leaders — who uniformly claim to want San Francisco to return to pre-pandemic normalcy — need to step up.
So far, they’re falling way short. The Standard reached out to all the companies whose CEOs or top executives are members of the Partnership for SF to ask about their return-to-work policies. A smattering have adopted RTO policies that mirror Lurie’s mandate that city workers show up at least four days a week. These include apparel giant Gap, the Golden State Warriors, Jony Ive’s design shop LoveFrom, and several financial firms. However, the overwhelming majority require less of their workers, as seen in the chart below.
Keep reading here, including to see that revelatory chart.