Many work at home, miss traffic jams

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SAN FRANCISCO -- The first business day after a major highway collapsed could have been a snarl of traffic jams, detours and road blocks for Victor Cousins, a Sun Microsystems Inc. employee who usually car pools into San Francisco from his Oakland apartment.

Instead, Cousins bypassed the crumpled stretch of road and participated in conference calls from his home office, without changing out of his basketball shorts.

"I avoided the chaos this morning," said Cousins, 30, a human resources business partner at Sun. "From what I'm hearing, it could be six months or more of problems. I absolutely know this will change my patterns and I'll be working from home a lot more often."

The day after an elevated section of highway that funnels traffic from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to key freeways was destroyed, officials credited telecommuters like Cousins for roads that were only slightly more clogged then any other weekday.

"We are noticing that a lot of people have stayed home today," said San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokeswoman Janis Yuen. "There's a bit of a learning curve, but people are pulling it together and finding ways to make things work."

Silicon Valley technology companies have some of the world's most liberal policies on working from home. Having co-workers log in from the suburbs is no big deal for firms such as Intel Corp. and Oracle Corp., which have aggressively outsourced programming and engineering jobs to low-cost tech hubs in China, Russia and India.

"I have not heard a peep about this disrupting work so far," said Jamie Jarvis, who works from home three days a week coordinating commuting programs for Adobe Systems Inc. "Our telecommute program is always there and available, and we don't have to say, There's a disaster so we're going to turn on this program now.' "

Sun Microsystems, where Cousins works, is one of the industry's biggest advocates of telecommuting. The Santa Clara-based hardware and software company expanded its telecommute policies after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when many companies crafted emergency response plans to reduce reliance on a single building.

Today, 56 percent of Sun's 34,494 employees work without an assigned office -- either at home or at a satellite office far from the headquarters.
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