New York City Mayor Eric Adams is urging CEOs to bring their workers back into Manhattan

• New York City Mayor Eric Adams wants CEOs to bring workers back in the office.
• He says it will prop up the local economy as well as provide much-needed revenue for the city.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams urged the city's CEOs to bring workers back to the office at a press conference on Wednesday, according to Axios.

"I'm hoping within the next few weeks, the CEOs map out a real plan of 'this is when you need to come back," he said, per the outlet.

Adams' pitch was that workers need to come back, particularly to office buildings in Manhattan, to spend money and support other small businesses, despite setbacks from the omicron variant.

"When employees don't return to work, they don't eat lunch at a nearby restaurant, shop at a local store, or take their clothes to the dry cleaners. Our business districts suffer, and it slows the recovery," he said, according to the transcript.

He also claimed that New Yorkers were returning to the office more slowly than in other cities, citing office security firm Kastle Systems' "Back to Work Barometer" that has been using client data to analyze and publish information about workers returning to office. The company says it has data from 2,600 buildings, 41,000 businesses and 47 states.

Kastle's barometer takes average weekly office swipe-ins from major cities, from San Jose to Washington DC, to create a "10 city average occupancy." As of last Wednesday, Kastle Systems shows "New York Metro" as 28.6% office occupancy, compared to the average of 31.6%.

Adams' call comes as COVID cases are falling from their peak in early January. In Manhattan, cases have dropped by 61% in the last two weeks, according to the New York Times' database.

Adams lamented this, saying vacant offices decrease tax income for the city. He has previously asked company leaders to bring workers back to offices, but might face major headwinds: More than half of US office workers (61%) said they're choosing not to go back into the office, according to Pew Research Center.

The press conference was to introduce Adams' preliminary budget for fiscal year 2023, where he focused on improving efficiency and cutting costs.

"Fiscal discipline will be key to my administration's success," he said.