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From New Yorker

From Vox

Walmart, Uber, and McDonald’s are requiring office workers to get vaccinated. Stores, cars, and warehouses are a different story.

Workers at places like Walmart and McDonald’s have been on the front lines of the pandemic for months. But when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccine, their employers are treading lightly with just how far to push them.

Major brands and corporations were initially hesitant to wade into the debate over whether to mandate vaccines for their workers. Many advocated to get their employees access to the vaccine as early as possible, but the hope was — as with many government and public health officials — that a significant majority of people would opt to get the shots voluntarily. That’s not what has played out in reality.

Now, with cases on the rise in many parts of the country and the dangerous delta variant proving to be highly contagious, “please, get a shot” messaging has become “really, get a shot” for many workers. Thus far, however, companies have been much keener to require vaccinations of white-collar workers than of front-line workers, many of whom were declared “essential” during the pandemic. This yet again drives home the divisions and inequities exposed among America’s workforce during the pandemic.

Walmart, for example, will require all of its corporate and regional staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by October 4 unless they have an “approved exception,” namely, a religious or medical reason not to be vaccinated. But it isn’t asking the same of store associates and warehouse workers, to whom it is instead offering a $150 incentive for getting vaccinated (it previously offered $75) and paid time off. McDonald’s has taken a similar approach and is requiring its US corporate workers to be vaccinated by September 27 while offering restaurant employees at the locations it owns four hours of paid leave to get a vaccine (most McDonald’s locations are owned by franchises and not directly by the company). AT&T is mandating vaccines for managers and starting negotiations with unions about a similar rule for other workers. Uber and Lyft are requiring their corporate employees to get vaccinated to return to the office, but they’re not mandating shots for drivers.

From a business perspective, it’s possible these decisions make sense: It’s easier, logistically, to compel a smaller pool of corporate employees to get the Covid-19 vaccine, which they may not be as hesitant about in the first place. With a broader pool of floor workers, a vaccine mandate may be more difficult to orchestrate or enforce. Many businesses are already struggling to find workers, and they don’t want to turn anyone off.

But from a public health perspective, asking office workers to get vaccinated while having a different set of rules for employees in much higher contact with the general public (as well as other workers) does not really add up.

“The reality is that the goal of a business, the goal of a company, is not the same as public health,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco. “A fundamental tenet in protecting public health is ensuring that those who are most vulnerable, namely front-line workers, are going to be protected.”

To be sure, some companies are obligating all their employees to get vaccinated. Disney says all of its salaried and non-union hourly workers at its US sites have to get the shot, and it’s negotiating with its unionized workers over the issue right now. Tyson Foods, which has seen severe Covid-19 outbreaks among its employees, is requiring all of its office workers to be vaccinated by October 1 and the rest of its workforce by November 1. Many state and federal workers are required to get vaccinated or get tested regularly. More employers could get tougher on their vaccine rules, especially as the pandemic rages on, frustration with the unvaccinated grows, and more companies jump on board.

“There’s probably a degree of bravery or going out on a limb for employers,” said Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “Maybe it’ll hit some tipping point. But right now your largest ones, Amazon and Walmart, are not mandating it for their line staff. If they were to make that call, my guess is that lots of other companies would follow suit.”

“The fact of the matter is that it’s a very touchy situation,” said Ed Egee, vice president of workforce development at the National Retail Federation. “There’s only so many levers we can pull.”

Mandating vaccines for workers is legal. It’s also hard.

It is, by and large, legal for companies to require their workers to be vaccinated, as long as they provide accommodations for people who for certain reasons, such as their religion or a disability, cannot. (Vox’s Ian Millhiser has a full explainer on the issue here.) But just because employers can mandate vaccines doesn’t mean they are necessarily eager to, for a variety of reasons.

There are a lot of “complexities” to mandating the vaccine for workers in the field, said Kory Lundberg, a spokesperson for Walmart, in an email. “Because our office associates are a much smaller population that’s concentrated in a few geographic areas, and because most are planning to return to the office in the coming weeks, we feel it’s much more practical to move to a requirement for that group,” he said.

Walmart didn’t specify the complexities it’s worried about, but it’s not hard to make some inferences as to what those may be. The company employs 1.6 million people in the US, the vast majority of whom work at its stores and warehouses, and trying to wade through how many of those people were vaccinated, decipher exceptions, and perhaps put in place testing regimes for people who aren’t vaccinated but want to keep working would be expensive and logistically hard. A vaccine mandate for all of its workers could also spark backlash in places and among people who are more vaccine-hesitant, including employees and customers. And with many businesses complaining of a shortage specifically of low-wage workers, many companies, including Walmart, may not be eager to risk alienating any potential employees. Walmart is already offering bonuses to warehouse workers to try to keep them on through the holidays.

“If you’re trying to mandate vaccines, some goodly number of workers are going to insist that they want to do something else,” Egee said.

Lindsay Ryan, an employment lawyer based in California, noted that in many places, the laws around vaccines are evolving in a way that may render it tricky for national corporations to manage requirements. Montana, for example, has made vaccination status a “protected class,” meaning that with few exceptions, employers can’t discriminate against workers based on whether they’ve gotten the Covid-19 shot. “It’s a different thing to mandate it for corporate offices and headquarters where it’s easy to know the applicable laws for that jurisdiction,” she said. “They don’t want to implement a mandatory vaccine policy and [then] take it back.”

Companies with a franchise model, like McDonald’s, might not have as direct of a say in what is asked of workers who are employed directly by the franchisee and not the corporation. “In many instances, the frontline workers who people might normally associate as employees of the corporation are actually employees who are under the control of franchise owners, so the corporate policy will only apply to corporate employees,” Ryan said.

McDonald’s didn’t return a request for comment for this story on its decision process.

While it’s not the case with McDonald’s and Walmart, many companies must also deal with unions when deciphering how to approach vaccines. “If they’re there already with bargaining authority, they’ve got power. If unions have bargaining power, they can require bargaining before the employer mandates vaccines,” said Sam Estreicher, a law professor at New York University’s School of Law and director of its Center for Labor and Employment Law.

That’s what’s happening at Disney. Eric Clinton, the president of Unite Here Local 362, which represents thousands of Disney World workers in Florida, said there are a lot of “complicated details” in working out how vaccine requirements will work with unionized employees. The union and the company have to come to an agreement on what exceptions should be and how they’ll be reviewed as well as accommodations for unvaccinated people. Workers could be given a different shift, be required to wear more personal protective equipment, or wind up in a different job altogether, depending on what kind of agreement is reached.

Throughout negotiations, the union has been adamant that it backs the Covid-19 vaccine. “Our position is very clear: The vaccine is the best way to protect yourself as a front-line worker. Period,” Clinton said. “If this was a firefighters union and they didn’t get a proper suit to go into a burning building, we’d be demanding that.”

Some of the workers who need vaccines don’t want them

Front-line workers are among those most vulnerable to contracting and spreading Covid-19. They’re in contact with the public and often find themselves in close quarters and dealing with customers whose vaccination statuses are unknown and are often unmasked. They’re the people who, from a public health standpoint, are arguably among those most important to protect from the disease. They are also often from groups that are less likely to be vaccinated.

The vaccination rate across the US tends to be lower among low-income people and Black and Hispanic people, who are also likelier to be front-line and “essential” workers. There is also a partisan bent to vaccinations, with Republicans generally being more hesitant than Democrats. If companies require vaccines for front-line workers, they risk alienating a group of people who, for whatever reason, tend to be more vaccine-hesitant. At the same time, if they don’t, they risk exacerbating racial, geographic, and income divides in vaccinations. Requiring shots for some but not all workers is a policy that “has the potential to really entrench some of these vaccine inequities,” warned Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University.

According to a recent survey from Just Capital, which tracks corporate social responsibility, in collaboration with the Harris Poll, Americans are becoming more amenable to employer vaccine mandates, with 46 percent of respondents saying they think companies should make workers get vaccinated in an August poll compared to 36 percent who said the same in June. But there are divides: 56 percent of people making over $100,000 want worker vaccine mandates compared to 46 percent of people making under $50,000, and just 28 percent of Black respondents agree with worker mandates compared to 53 percent of Hispanic respondents and 47 percent of white respondents.

A separate Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that vaccinated adults are much likelier to say the government should recommend employer vaccine mandates than unvaccinated adults, by 68 percent to 19 percent.

In other words, some of the workers who most urgently need the vaccine are those who don’t want it, or want to be told to get it. And companies are likely well aware that is part of what they’re facing.

“I don’t want to say that they don’t have an interest in protecting their workers, but the primary interest of a company is keeping the company running,” Bibbins-Domingo, the University of California epidemiologist, said. “While it is always helpful when business interests align with our public health goals, businesses are not public health agencies.”

On how to get workers vaccinated, there are a lot of thorny questions ahead

The conversation about how to compel people to get the Covid-19 vaccine is constantly evolving, including how private businesses should approach the matter. Not all worker groups and unions are in agreement, nor are companies or business groups or workers themselves. But as the clock ticks and the virus continues to spread, the situation is becoming more urgent.

United for Respect, a nonprofit that advocates for retail workers’ rights, including at Walmart, has not taken an official position on mandatory vaccinations. Instead, it is advocating for a $500 bonus for workers who get the vaccine. The Consumer Brands Association, which represents companies such as Clorox, Coca-Cola, and General Mills, says some of its members expect vaccine mandates will occur at some point, but not until the Food and Drug Administration grants full approval of the shots, which are currently under emergency use authorization. “[Consumer packaged goods] manufacturers are largely pursuing a carrot rather than a stick approach. Across the industry, substantial incentives are in place to encourage employees to get vaccinated. In the weeks and months ahead, we expect a stick approach and potential employer mandates to become more common,” said Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the Consumer Brands Association, in a statement to Vox.

The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group that represents CEOs from major corporations, said a number of its members (which include Walmart) have decided to mandate vaccines for some or all employees, while others are still deciphering how to navigate opposition from policymakers at the state and local levels. But in light of Covid-19 spikes and infectious variants, it expects additional announcements from members.

Clinton, from Unite Here Local 362, said he’s continuing to have ongoing conversations with members who are nervous about the vaccine, but resistance isn’t as prevalent as one might think. “Are there people who are anti- vaxxers or are doing ‘my body, my choice’ type of stuff that currently work at Disney? Certainly,” he said. “There’s not as many as I thought there would be; it just turns out they’re really loud, so it feels like there are more of them.” He thinks he’s gotten about 20 calls out of some 9,000 members.

Many companies are continuing to try to nudge employees with incentives to get vaccinated by offering time off and bonuses, and bringing vaccines to work, among other measures. Egee, from the National Retail Federation, said his members have had some success with incentives, but not a ton. “It didn’t move the needle a lot — probably a few percentage points here or there,— but we’ve done everything we could,” he said.

The decision for companies to mandate vaccines for all of their workers — and not just the ones it’s easiest for them to do so far — is complicated. There are no easy answers. If they require shots for people who really don’t want to get them, they might leave those people out of a job, find themselves struggling to hire workers, or face public backlash. If they require shots for some workers and not all, they risk making vaccine inequality across the US worse or sowing discord among groups of workers.

Companies generally don’t want to take many risks that could harm their businesses. In weighing requirements around Covid-19, there’s no risk-free scenario.

“I was a broken man that day,” he said. “In the aftermath of an earthquake, we would deal with injured or dead people. But here we had people who were alive, who we were treating, and they were dying. I have never felt this helpless in my life.”

Dr. Shiv Charan Lal Gupta (second from right) visits a patient at Batra Hospital in Delhi. During the peak of the second wave, he lost 12 Covid-19 patients, including a colleague, after oxygen ran out in the hospital.
Amal KS/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Relatives of a Covid-19 victim mourn outside Batra Hospital on May 1.
Amal KS/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
An oxygen tanker leaves after replenishing supplies at Batra Hospital on May 1.

Gupta was witnessing firsthand the collapse of India’s health system, buckling under the pressure of a pandemic. Across the country, patients were dying because hospitals ran out of oxygen.

“Every hospital loses patients. But if patients die because there is no oxygen, that is wrong,” said Gupta, a former legislator with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Long before an unprecedented wave of infections and death began this spring, there were warning signs that India’s chronically underfunded health system would struggle against the deadly new virus.

Less than 40 percent of Indians have health coverage. The country spends a smaller share of its GDP on health care than most of its economic peers. The country’s health outcomes, such as life expectancy and infant mortality, trail accordingly. Indians pay a higher share of the country’s health care expenditures out of their own pockets.

Indian experts say this reality reflects the government’s failure to invest in a sustainable health system for the world’s largest democracy.

As a result, when Covid-19 hit, there were not enough hospitals, particularly in the rural parts of the country. There were not enough doctors or nurses. Overworked community health volunteers were stretched beyond their limits. The system was so overloaded that some patients died before finding out the results of their Covid-19 test.

David Talukdar/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Colleagues pay tribute to a friend who died of Covid-19 complications in Assam, India, on May 29.

The toll has been enormous: The more than 430,000 official deaths from Covid-19 are believed to be a serious undercount. The actual number of deaths may be as high as 3 million to 5 million. A recent antibody study suggested more than half of India’s people have contracted Covid-19.

India’s failures parallel those in other countries both rich and poor. A decentralized health system dependent on private industry pushed much of the cost of medical care onto individuals and families, exposing deep disparities between the haves and have-nots — a familiar narrative in the US. As in other developing economies, including Brazil and Colombia, systemic failures and insufficiencies resulted in overwhelmed hospitals and patients left to die without care.

But in sheer magnitude, no Covid-19 catastrophe matches India’s.

Indian leaders have known for years their health system needed improvement. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who came to power with the BJP in 2014 on a Hindu nationalist platform, tried to reform it. In 2018, his administration established a new health insurance program that would cover hospital services for more than one-third of Indians, targeted to lower-income groups. But that program has struggled to meet its goals.

“Now a country that aspires to be a global leader is seeing people die because they can’t get oxygen,” Rama Baru, who studies India health policy at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Vox. “I feel quite shocked. We’ve never had a time in our history when we lost our humanness.”

Altaf Qadri/AP

Funeral pyres of victims of Covid-19 burn at a makeshift crematorium in Delhi on April 24.

India’s broken promise on universal care

When India broke from British rule in 1947, its new constitution established health as a human right: “The State shall regard the raising of the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people and the improvement of public health as among its primary duties,” the document, ratified in 1949, reads.

Responsibility was delegated to the 28 states and territories that now comprise the Indian Union. States, not the national government, would fund the hospitals where people could get care and cover the cost of providing those services.

But states immediately struggled to deliver on that promise.

In part, India had been set up to fail. After centuries of economic exploitation, the country was left destitute. India had accounted for almost one-quarter of the world’s economy in 1700; by 1952, it represented less than 4 percent. Money was scarce.

But even as the Indian economy exploded in recent decades, the country spent less on health care than other large emerging markets. Brazil spends eight times as much public funding per person on health care as India does. Nearby Thailand spends seven times as much.

“Within their income class, they’re low,” Cheryl Cashin, who studies health system development at the nonprofit research group Results for Development, said of India. “They’re not following the normal pathway as countries become wealthier.”

The lack of funding is due in part to the challenges facing a country pulling itself out of deep poverty. But some experts also blame the national government for failing to provide more support to the states. The result is that a parallel, private health care system has emerged, where prices vary considerably and most expenses are paid out of pocket.

The waiting room outside the emergency ward of Civil Hospital in Gurgaon, a public hospital run under the jurisdiction of the Haryana Department of Health.
Inside the waiting room of Batra Hospital, a 500-bed private facility in Delhi.

Ultimately, private insurance pays for less than 5 percent of India’s overall health expenditures. Out-of-pocket spending accounts for more than 60 percent. The disparities have deepened over time: Wealthy people could seek top-quality care at for- profit private hospitals, while the less affluent were left relying on an underfunded public system.

Modi’s new health insurance program, established in 2018, was supposed to fix that. But a 2021 review published by Duke University researchers found the program has seen mixed results. Many eligible people in poorer states are still unaware it exists. Its record in providing financial protection to its beneficiaries was “mixed,” in part because it covered only hospital care.

During the pandemic, an analysis by Jeevan Raksha, a public-private partnership from the Public Health Foundation of India and the management consulting firm Proxima, found the program covered less than 1 percent of all Covid-19 tests and 14 percent of all related hospitalization costs in India during the second coronavirus wave.

India’s health care infrastructure has also languished. The Modi administration set a goal of opening or upgrading 150,000 primary care clinics across the country but had only gotten to a fraction of that number when Covid-19 struck.

“Covid exposed the deep fault lines,” said Indrani Gupta, who leads health policy research at the Institute for Economic Growth in Delhi. “Dysfunctional health systems can never cope with pandemics and epidemics efficiently.”

The private Artemis Hospital in suburban Gurgaon offers 400-plus beds and state-of-the-art medical care.

Medical workers were left on their own

During the pandemic, the failure of India’s health system was total. Providers were left ill-equipped to handle the surge of patients. And even the people who did get care often faced unaffordable medical expenses.

“It was an unprecedented situation,” Sandip Datta, assistant professor at the Delhi School of Economics, said. “The health infrastructure we have, both public and private combined, was not adequate to serve everyone who was getting infected.”

In many areas, there are fewer doctors and nurses per capita than is recommended by the World Health Organization. When hospitals ran out of lifesaving supplies, they were blamed and, in a few cases, even attacked.

On his second day working at a Covid-19 care center in Assam’s Hojai district, Seuj Kumar Senapati began treating a patient who had come in with a fever and mild cough; when he checked on the patient later, they were unresponsive. A mob of 30 people chased the young doctor around the hospital, eventually catching and assaulting him.

“I didn’t even get a chance to do anything to revive the patient,” Senapati told Vox.

As major medical centers and clinics were being overwhelmed, India relied on its community health workforce — accredited social health activists, commonly known as ASHAs — to be the vanguard of the Covid response.

ASHAs are quasi-volunteers who receive nominal compensation to raise public health awareness in their villages and neighborhoods. The Indian government created the corps in 2005, as doctors and nurses moved to the emerging private health care sector.

While they confronted Covid-19 this year, those volunteers were often left on their own when they themselves got sick.

Poonam Sharma, an ASHA, or accredited social health activist, makes her daily rounds at Tigra Village, near Delhi. Sharma’s bonus pay for Covid-related work expired last fall, long before the surge in spring 2021.

Sangeeta Kamble had been working for months as an ASHA in her rural village of Yellapur, near India’s western coast, when she came down with Covid-19 in March 2021. Her husband and son were soon sick, too, and her husband, who has diabetes and two partially amputated legs, quickly deteriorated.

She called the doctor at a nearby government hospital — a 30-minute drive away in the town of Shirala — but no beds were available. They visited two other hospitals before finally getting a bed at a government medical college late in the night.

“Despite helping people during the pandemic, there was no bed for front-line workers like me,” Kamble, 34, said.

Her husband pulled through after two weeks in the hospital with oxygen support, and his care at a public facility was covered by the government. But his family, who are uninsured, have been on their own as he deals with post-infection complications. Kamble does tailoring work on the side, to bring in some extra income.

“But that’s not nearly enough to pay for his medicines,” she said.

Poonam Sharma, an ASHA in Tigra Village, located near New Delhi, has been working seven days a week for the past year, up to 10 hours a day, all for about $50 US every month; bonus pay for Covid-related work expired in the fall, long before the surge.

Sharma, 42, knows of three ASHAs who died of Covid-19 in the region. She said their families had still not received the generous life insurance payout that the government had pledged to provide — equivalent to nearly $70,000.

“No one cared for their families,” she said.

Will Covid-19 lead to reform?

No part of India’s health system has gone unscathed in the pandemic; even patients with private insurance have struggled to pay the bills. Because private health insurance in the country is so unregulated, some plans did not even cover Covid-19 care unless individuals or employers purchased it as an added benefit.

Isha Nagpal has health insurance through her job at a TV network, but when her father was hospitalized for months after a case of Covid-19 and ensuing complications, she faced more than $20,000 in medical bills that her insurer had not paid.

“I couldn’t argue with them at that point because I was just seeing so many patients dying every day in the ICU,” Nagpal told Vox. “But the hospital just went on overcharging us.”

Nagpal covered the costs through donations, with help from the nonprofit group Mutual Aid India, and through her personal savings.

For many in India, such a financial setback is life-altering: “There are studies that suggest that poor people are falling into the poverty trap only because of health care expenditure,” Datta, the economist, said. “They may be barely above the poverty level, but because of expenditure on sudden disease, they are again falling back into poverty.”

Those are the symptoms of a broken health system. But Indian health policy experts appear skeptical this would be a moment for reform in their country.

“This is an opportunity to strengthen the public health system,” Baru said. “But we don’t see that happening.”

As the Indian economy grows, more money will inevitably go to health care. It’s part of the natural life cycle of any health system. But that alone may not fix the problem.

Nonprofits often step in to fill a need when the government cannot provide easy access to health care. 
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/4Ym2trIJwnmbsIF66P3XkIw1x_4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22791159/VOX_6582_copy.jpg" />
A Covid-19 vaccination drive organized by the nonprofit Swasti at Hasanpur Village in Haryana, targeting street laborers and informal workers.

The Indian health system is highly decentralized. It’s largely deregulated, and it pushes a high portion of costs on to patients. That tends to lead to worse outcomes and deeper disparities, in part because powerful industry actors oppose reform.

Baru described the rise of what she calls the “medical-industrial complex” in India. The national government has generally been more interested in accommodating the private sector than in solidifying the public health system.

There was “a capture of policy by the private sector,” she said. “The voice for the need for a public health sector was rather weak.”

In the United States, the influence of the private sector has made fixing the structural problems of the health system extremely difficult. Obvious problems remain intractable. India runs the risk of following the same path.

Shiv Charan Lal Gupta is clear on what went wrong when he lost his friend and 11 other patients, when he heard stories about bodies being dumped in the Ganges River, and when he witnessed his country’s health system’s effective collapse.

“What was the problem?” Gupta said. “There was hardly any structure.”

The pandemic exposed the woeful insufficiencies in the core pieces of the Indian health system. The right to health enshrined in the constitution exists more in theory than in practice. The pieces are there, but they are not good enough in their current form.

The past year has been one trauma after another. Gupta wants change.

“If these systems are actually put in place,” he said, “the problem will be solved.”

Pamposh Raina is a New Delhi-based journalist. Makepeace Sitlhou is a journalist based in Guwahati.

Smita Sharma is an independent photojournalist based in Delhi.

The company is rolling out a virtual reality videoconference app as part of its “metaverse” future.

With no end to the Covid-19 pandemic in sight, it looks like many of us may be working home for even longer than we initially imagined.

Facebook is capitalizing on that with the release of its new virtual reality office meeting software, Horizon Workrooms. The idea is that you can interact with your colleagues remotely in a simulated, 3D conference room, complete with cartoon avatars, “spatial sound,” and hand motion tracking. Think of it like Zoom on steroids. For now, the software is free to use, and anyone can join by dialing in to video call — but to get the full experience, you’ll need one of Facebook’s Oculus 2 headsets. Facebook says the Oculus-powered version of Workrooms has already been used widely within the company for the past six months.

“Workrooms is our flagship collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance,” the company said in a press release announcing the launch.

The new product is another sign that Facebook is investing heavily in its VR- and AR-filled “metaverse,” which CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently described as an “embodied internet” where people communicate through digital representations of themselves. Facebook recently created an executive team to build out the metaverse, and as of last March, nearly a fifth of the company was working on AR or VR, according to the Information.

Zuckerberg — along with many other leaders in tech — views AR and VR as the next frontier in computing, akin to the mobile phone.

But so far, the technology has only really taken off among gamers. So it makes sense that the company is building a product that aims to make the technology more useful for a mainstream audience. A spokesperson for Facebook noted that Zuckerberg himself has hosted meetings using Workrooms.

Facebook isn’t the first company to come up with the idea of VR-powered office meetings. Spatial, which Recode’s Adam Clark Estes wrote about last year, offers a lot of the same features as Workrooms, raising familiar questions about whether Facebook is copying some of its smaller competitors. And while early adopters may love the idea of using cutting-edge technology to make virtual office meetings less dull, it could be years before the average person uses VR for entertainment, let alone for work.

Still, Workrooms is trying to leverage an interesting new technology at just the right time. Many office workers are burned out after a year and a half of working from home and for a return to a more normal office setting — or the next best thing.

How Workrooms works

When you’re in a Horizon Workrooms meeting, the idea is that it should feel almost like you’re actually in the same physical space as the other people in the room.

Recode hasn’t yet tried out the product, but based on what we know from Facebook’s demo videos and product descriptions, participants are supposed to experience a kind of “mixed reality,” which combines aspects of the virtual world with the real one — for example, you can still type on your actual computer keyboard and have that register in the simulated meeting room. Once you’re in the meeting room, you can do all the things you’d do in a regular videoconference, but with some enhancements. For example, you can collaborate on a virtual whiteboard, which you can write on using hand gestures (which the Oculus headset tracks) or an Oculus handheld controller.

Everything is supposed to feel much more like the real world than in a traditional videoconference. You can project your notes onto a board in the front of the virtual room, and using a technology called “spatial sound,” you can hear people better when you tilt your head toward them.

While there’s a lot of promise for Facebook’s workrooms app, there are also significant hurdles.

Facebook’s biggest hurdle with Workrooms is a simple logistical one: Most people don’t have an Oculus Quest 2 headset. The cost of the $300 hardware will undoubtedly be a barrier for many potential users to access the full experience.

Aside from that, there are also potentially major privacy concerns about people giving Facebook more data. Facebook has said that it will not use the conversations you have in Workrooms to inform ads on Facebook, and that the technology will only process images of your home environment locally. But given the company’s controversial track record on protecting user privacy, it may be hard to convince people to let Facebook into their lives more than they already have.

Facebook has also struggled so far to get people invested in metaverse-ready products. Spaces, the company’s previous attempt at a virtual environment, was geared toward social conversations, but it never took off and is now defunct. Facebook has, however, seen some success with its messaging app for work, Workplace Messenger. And virtual reality technology has become much more accessible since then, with the price of headsets dropping from a price point of a few thousand dollars to a few hundred.

Facebook’s Workrooms app is a foundational step in the company’s grand “metaverse” vision. And whether or not people actually want to participate in this new world, Facebook’s CEO is extremely excited about it.

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