The return of Sherwin-Williams’ workers may revive downtown Cleveland — but not without resistance

CLEVELAND, Ohio — When Cleveland agreed to help Sherwin-Williams build a new downtown headquarters in early 2020, the city was trying to do something familiar: keep jobs, payroll and tax dollars from leaving the city.In September 2019, Sherwin-Williams had announced a nationwide search for a new global headquarters and consolidated research facility. Cleveland officials offered the company an incentive package worth millions of dollars to make staying attractive. In return, Sherwin-Williams agreed to maintain 3,138 full-time-equivalent jobs in Cleveland and roughly $347.2 million in payroll — an economic base that generated about $8.7 million in city income-tax revenue.Not long after the agreements were finalized, the COVID-19 pandemic emptied office buildings across the country and ushered in an era in which remote and hybrid work reshaped expectations about the workplace, while promising greater flexibility, work-life balance and, for many employees, productivity. Now, more than six years later, Sherwin-Williams has opened its new roughly 1-million-square-foot headquarters near Public Square, requiring office employees to show up in person five days a week.For the city, that is welcome news. The deal was written to protect jobs and taxes. And the return of so many workers has become something bigger: the spark city officials and business leaders hope will finally bring a pandemic-battered downtown back to life.For many of those workers, however, it feels like a loss. The return-to-office mandate ended a hybrid arrangement many had built their lives around. They arranged child care, bought homes and reshaped their daily routines around working remotely — and now that flexibility is gone.The result is a 36-story tower standing at the intersection of three competing interests: a company’s push for in-person collaboration, a city’s fight to bring downtown back to life and a workforce that had reorganized life around working from home.What the deals requireThe centerpiece of the 2020 incentive package that the city offered Sherwin-Williams was a $13.5 million construction grant, a 30-year tax-increment-financing agreement and a Job Creation Incentive Program grant worth up to $11.5 million.In return, Sherwin agreed to maintain the 3,138 full-time-equivalent jobs and about $347 million in payroll it had in the city back in 2019.While the job grant ties a small number of jobs to the headquarters itself through 2035, the other agreements focus on maintaining the company’s Cleveland employment and payroll commitments. The city counts each full-time job as 2,080 hours a year — 52 weeks at 40 hours. The agreements say qualifying employees can count toward those commitments if they are deemed to be working in Cleveland for payroll purposes. That can include employees at the new headquarters, the company’s existing Cleveland locations and, in some cases, employees working from home who live in Cleveland. Those payroll rules are the real point of the threshold: as long as the work counts as Cleveland work, the city keeps collecting the income tax it is counting on from the deal.That has become even more important in a post-pandemic world because of the way Ohio municipal income tax is allocated.Before COVID-19, the state used what was known as a “20-day rule.” Municipal income tax generally went to the city where an employee’s main workplace was located. If the employee worked somewhere else, their employer generally didn’t have to shift that tax to the other city unless the employee worked there more than 20 days in a single year.When the pandemic hit, Ohio temporarily changed the rules. Days employees worked from home were counted as days at their main workplace. That let Cleveland and other cities keep collecting income tax from workers who were no longer physically there.That temporary rule ended Dec. 31, 2021, and the 20-day rule has returned. Now, once a Sherwin-Williams employee who lives in the suburbs works from home more than 20 days a year, their municipal income tax can flow to their home community instead of Cleveland.What employees sayFor the thousands now commuting in five days a week, the math that matters isn’t municipal tax — it’s what the change costs them at home.In Reddit threads about the policy, users who identify themselves as current and former employees describe years of flexibility being ripped away after they had built family and work routines around it. “In the 16 years I’ve been here, we’ve been remote at least one day per week,” one person wrote. “Acquired two kids since then, and the family dynamic we’ve made hinges on it... That’s not the job I signed up for.”Some also question whether the new headquarters delivers the workplace they expected, describing an unassigned, “hoteling”-style seating setup rather than dedicated desks. Others cite downtown safety and parking costs as additional burdens of the commute. Several frame the five-day policy as a disguised workforce reduction.“They clearly wanted to do a layoff without doing layoffs for optics reasons,” one wrote.The pandemic has left Cleveland with a problem that did not exist in quite the same way when the Sherwin-Williams deal was signed. Before 2020, about 8% of U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs were exclusively remote, according to a Gallup poll. At the peak of the pandemic, it topped 70%. In 2026, the poll shows that 26% of those employees are exclusively remote, 52% are hybrid and only 22% are entirely on-site.The study also found that letting people work from home a couple of days a week raises job satisfaction and often lifts productivity. However, while a productive worker sitting at home may still contribute to a company’s bottom line, that worker does little for a downtown restaurant, store or parking garage.That raises a difficult question: Who should bear the cost of making downtown successful?For an employer, five days in the office may create more chances for face-to-face work and collaboration. In Sherwin-Williams’ case, it opened the door to financial incentives that supported the headquarters project.But it also creates costs. Longer commutes can make recruiting harder, employees who value flexibility may leave or a company could lose experienced workers and spend more money replacing them.For employees, the costs are more immediate: commuting time, disrupted routines, less control over their schedules and less time at home. What leaders saySherwin-Williams declined an interview and referred cleveland.com to its “Building Our Future” online FAQ page. On it, the company says that the size of the project was “never reduced” because of remote-work trends, and that it has now surpassed the amount of in-office work the city’s deal requires.Sherwin-Williams says the five-day policy is about more than where people sit. In a July 2025 email to staff announcing the change, CEO Heidi G. Petz called it a way of “driving stronger engagement, better collaboration, accelerating innovation.”For Cleveland, the benefit is easier to see on the street: More people in office towers means more people downtown.The number of Cleveland employees returning to in-office work has risen in recent years. While 2025 figures are not yet available, Cleveland reached a 71.9% return-to-office rate in 2024 compared with 2019, according to Downtown Cleveland, Inc.Michael Deemer, the organization’s president, says Sherwin-Williams’ decision to bring employees back in-office has encouraged other employers to move in the same direction, contributing to downtown activity.“In-person work supports downtown businesses, safety, activity and ultimately a stronger local economy. Sherwin-Williams understands this, and their global headquarters sets the tone for other large employers of the urban core.”Tom McNair, the city’s chief of integrated development, said the 2020 incentive deal predates Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration but still supports the city’s broader effort to revive downtown by keeping workers in the area.“Having people on the upper floors impacts what happens on the ground floors quite a bit,” McNair said.Cleveland has spent years trying to recover from the loss of office workers downtown. City documents already identified shrinking businesses, rising vacancies, empty storefronts and limited retail as problems in 2020, challenges the pandemic later intensified.McNair pointed to the downtown Heinen’s grocery store as an example of what happens when office workers disappear. Business there, he said, “dropped precipitously” as more employees worked from home.Cleveland’s interest extends beyond Sherwin-Williams. The city is working with downtown property owners, brokers and business groups to make the central business district more attractive to employers, residents and visitors while rebuilding the daily foot traffic that keeps restaurants and shops alive.“We know that no one is coming to save us,” McNair said.This article was produced with assistance from AI tools and reviewed by Cleveland.com staff.