Washingtonian CEO and president Cathy Merrill published an opinion piece in the Washington Post suggesting that employees who choose to continue working from home after the pandemic ends should be reclassified as contractors, and no longer receive benefits.

The editorial staff of the regional magazine has responded with a work stoppage.

“As members of the Washingtonian editorial staff, we want our CEO to understand the risks of not valuing our labor. We are dismayed by Cathy Merrill’s public threat to our livelihoods. We will not be publishing today,” a slew of staffers tweeted on Friday morning.

“Everyone was really surprised and shocked. It really felt like a slap in the face,” says senior editor Andrew Beaujon. “We had to answer publicly to what was basically a public letter to us … in a national newspaper.”

Merrill’s op-ed, ostensibly about the “erosion of office culture,” immediately ignited fury on social media, including from Ward 4 D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George.

I stand in solidarity with staff at the @washingtonian as they withhold their labor today. No worker should ever have their livelihood threatened for wanting to work from home during a pandemic. Reporters deserve so much better. https://t.co/9gCaMf75si

— Janeese Lewis George (@Janeese4DC) May 7, 2021

Merrill has been the CEO of Washingtonian Media since 2006 — the magazine has been under her family’s management since 1979. In March 2020, facing a drop in revenue due to the pandemic, Washingtonian laid off its fellows and instituted a 10-percent pay cut for staffers.

Now, Merrill is suggesting that CEOs strip employees who opt to remain remote of their benefits — like healthcare and 401(k) matching — because reporting to the office requires “extras” outside of one’s core job responsibility.

“I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities — ‘extra,'” Merrill writes in the piece. “It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor.'”

In an emailed statement to DCist, Merrill writes that she has “assured” the team that their employment status and benefits will not change.

“I could not be more proud of their work and achievements under the incredibly difficult circumstances of the past year. I have assured our team that there will be no changes to benefits or employee status,” Merrill writes. “I am sorry if the op-ed made it appear like anything else.”

Upon publication last night, the op-ed carried the title, “As a CEO, I want my employees to understand the risks of not returning to the office,” seemingly a direct statement to Washingtonian employees, although Merrill never specifically names her publication in the piece. (A line of text at the top of the post identifies her as chief executive of Washingtonian Media.) The headline has since been changed to, “As a CEO, I worry about the erosion of office culture with remote work.” According to the Washington Post’s report on the backlash, Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt asked to change the headline early Friday morning, before the strike, “to something that I thought better captured the piece.”

On Friday morning — shortly after several employees tweeted about the work stoppage — Merrill sent out an email to staff, attempting to explain her rationale for the article.

“My intent was to write about how worried I and other CEOs are about preserving the cultures we built up in our offices,” reads the email. “But I understand that some of you have read it as threatening, or as an indication that I’m anything less than ecstatically appreciative of the work and sacrifice of our team in 2020.”

“We have always been flexible with work schedules and time in the office.  That is not going to change,” she writes. “Furthermore, I am not changing any of our healthcare or 401k offerings or changing anyone to freelancer status.”

Still, Merrill’s public musings about the “tempting option” of reclassifying workers who don’t return to the office came as a painful surprise to her employees. An editorial staff member who spoke with DCist anonymously to protect their employment described feeling “upset and horrified” upon reading Merrill’s piece Friday morning.

“Dealing with the stress of living through a pandemic and working our asses off in the past year, to put out a magazine and have a site that’s constantly interesting and humming, and then just to read that is just like a slap in the face,” the staffer says. “What’s the point of all of this hard work that we’re doing when it appears as if the person who runs our publication doesn’t give a shit?”

Washingtonian staffers have been working from home since the start of the pandemic. However, in June, the magazine moved offices after more than four decades in its previous home. An October article in the publication about the new space on 18th and K streets NW describes the “loft-inspired space” in detail, noting that “There’s just one thing missing from the new office: Washingtonian’s staff. The suite was only about halfway done when COVID-19 hit—meaning most of us haven’t yet worked there. We hope that changes soon.”

In her op-ed, Merrill makes a broader argument about the detriment of telework on office culture, citing, anecdotally, that the CEOs she has spoken to fear “erosion of collaboration, creativity and culture,” if remote work or some hybrid formats remain post-pandemic.

But at her own small business, the anonymous staffer tells DCist that this is not the case.

“If anything, I feel like throughout the pandemic we’ve like really sort of in a weird way like grown closer,” they say. “She’s making these blanket statements about how remote work is affecting culture — that’s not been my experience at all.  If anything I feel like we’ve been really resilient and really quick on our feet to adapt.”

Merrill’s suggestion, viewed as a threat by her own employees, could also violate labor laws. According to Alan Lescht, an attorney with the D.C. employment law firm Alan Lescht & Associates, reclassifying a salaried employee to a contractor status depends on a number of factors — like the type of work they do, whether they are supervised, and whether they are supervising others. More importantly, he notes, giving preferential treatment to staffers who report to work physically may run afoul of anti-discrimination labor statutes that protect people with disabilities and other protected statuses in the workplace, who may not be able to return to the office.

“The suggestion that she would convert W2 employees to contractors because they’re teleworking is a bit much,” Lescht says. “Disabled individuals are considered to be a protected category in anti-discrimination laws in D.C., and [employees] who have parental responsibilities, or family responsibilities, or people who are caregivers to children, they’re entitled to accommodations and protection too.”

Both the staffer and Beaujon tell DCist that Washingtonian had not established any concrete return-to-office plans yet, but had discussed it broader terms. Beaujon says that staff members’ circumstances vary — some have children at home, while others may have moved out of their D.C. apartments during the pandemic. The anonymous staffer agrees, preferring that discussions of return-to-office plans include the actual workers that would be returning to said office.

“It’s not an issue of not wanting to go back to the office and see [my colleagues] but it’s more, ‘let us have a seat seat at the table, and don’t take us by surprise and make us feel like we’re undervalued.'”

Merrill’s enthusiasm about the end of remote work is shared by a faction of D.C. business leaders, who fear for the future of the city’s downtown economy if offices remain empty. According to D.C. Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey DeWitt, prior to the pandemic some 7% of workers with a job in the city worked from home. After the pandemic passes, DeWitt estimates that number might jump to 20%. A survey of employers conducted last fall by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments found that 57% of respondents said they would consider keeping their current levels of telework — or at least expand the use of telework they had before the pandemic struck.

Thursday night’s op-ed is the second time during the pandemic Merrill has offered up her views as a small business owner to a national audience. In March 2020, she penned a Washington Post op-ed calling the CDC’s recommended pause on gatherings over 50 people for eight weeks, a “death sentence for small businesses.” (Twelve days after the piece published, Merrill took to twitter to decry Gov. Larry Hogan’s ban on recreational boating, perhaps not a hill that other small business owners would die on during the early months of the pandemic).

As for what’s next for the Washingtonian staff, Beaujon says it’s unclear.

“The first thing we’re gonna do is just like object to her threatening us,” Beaujon says. “I really want to believe that this was just an error of judgment, to publish this thing in the Post rather than talking to us.”

This post has been updated with information regarding the headline change of Merrill’s original op-ed.