WASHINGTON, D.C. — When racial justice protests swept across the country last year, hope sprang that the change pushed for on the streets might spill over into the workplace, too.

“Increasingly, the world is getting to be more diverse,” Sandra Timmons, executive director of The Steve Fund, said last year. “This is the future workforce; these are the future leaders.”

However, experts on diversity say that hasn't quite come to fruition at work.

“While we do believe that certainly there's been a lot of good that's been done on by ‘diversity first’ consultancies, that change has not been as sustainable as it should be,” said Lauren Tucker, founder of “Do What Matters,” a consulting firm that helps businesses navigate inclusion in the workplace.

A recent report on diversity in the workplace, from the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, surveyed more than 1,500 working women across the country—more than two-thirds of them were women of color.

It found that 97% of those surveyed feel their employers need to establish better ways to investigate and address discrimination at work.

Among the other findings: 57% of women of color say they hear damaging stereotypes, based on their backgrounds, while they are at work. In addition, 58% say there are no senior leaders of color in their workplace.

Tucker said that’s where so-called, “activist employees” might be able to make their mark.

“Activist employees, in particular, are those who are leaning forward articulating to management what the expectations are,” Tucker said, “and I think we need to understand that those expectations are not just about getting a paycheck.”

It’s also about creating an inclusive environment, where ideas can be freely shared by everyone. Tucker said that starts in company meetings, though, it doesn’t always happen that way as she saw for herself two weeks ago.

“I actually timed how much men talked versus women, and 90% of the talking that was done in that meeting was done by men,” she said.

So, how can all employees help to start a change? Some suggestions include sharing your workplace knowledge with informal networks at work and including a diverse array of co-workers.

As for formal networks, Tucker said employees should get involved in a company’s employee resource group that addresses inclusion. If a company doesn’t have one, she said, employees should consider starting one of their own.

“They have a choice to stay in and lean forward, and a lot of them have activated these groups on their own,” Tucker said. “I mean, it isn't necessarily the employer that's created these groups.”

It’s a focus on diversity that Tucker believes companies should expect to keep seeing.

“What we're seeing is the growth of activism period, both by employees and by consumers,” she said. “And I will say that company leaders who dismiss this activism, company leaders that do not take advantage of listening to these employees, they do so at their peril.”

It is a risk that includes paying a potentially high price to their bottom line.

The White House took sweeping actions on Thursday regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. President Joe Biden announced a new vaccine mandate for federal employees, those in health care, and any company with 100 or more workers.

Richard Dreitzer, a specialist in labor and employment matters, says the decision was due to employers’ sense of urgency to keep employees safe.

RELATED: Biden lays out 6-pronged plan to combat COVID this fall

“Vaccines are proven by the FDA, they are safe and effective – that’s why they were proven for wide use – and there haven’t been any bad outcomes with people or very few of them, so people have more confidence that this is going to help them,” said Dreitzer.

President Biden also announced that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees to get vaccinated. When it comes to potential mandates like this, Dreitzer says, it can get tricky at the state level.

“I think the federal government cannot do that. In our country it is sort of an instance of a federalism thing, because the federal government has to defer to the authority of the states on certain matters, and regulating the health and safety of the public usually falls on the states first and the federal government second,” Dreitzer said.

Dreitzer says the federal government does have the power to require vaccination for federal employees. He says certain employees are running out of options. You either get vaccinated or leave your job.

“Vaccines are safe, they are effective, they work," said Dreitzer. "The history of them is good. In terms of bad outcomes, it is minimal, so it is harder and harder for them to say without any credibility, 'I don’t trust these vaccines because they make me sick.'”

Dreitzer says people will not receive unemployment benefits if they get fired for not being vaccinated.

“No, because that is a direct order from an employer that has a legitimate interest in keeping their workplace safe. And they come up to you and present that to you as an employee, and you say, 'You know what? I don’t want to,'” said Dreitzer.

The owners of restaurants, amusement parks and retail shops, many of them desperate for workers, are sounding an unusual note of gratitude this summer:

Thank goodness for teenagers.

As the U.S. economy bounds back with unexpected speed from the pandemic recession and customer demand intensifies, high school-age kids are filling jobs that older workers can’t — or won’t.

The result is that teens who are willing to bus restaurant tables or serve as water-park lifeguards are commanding $15, $17 or more an hour, plus bonuses in some instances or money to help pay for school classes. The trend marks a shift from the period after the 2007-2009 Great Recession, when older workers often took such jobs and teens were sometimes squeezed out.

The time, an acute labor shortage, especially at restaurants, tourism and entertainment businesses, has made teenage workers highly popular again.

"We’re very thankful they are here,’" says Akash Kapoor, CEO of Curry Up Now. Fifty teenagers are working this summer at his five San Francisco-area Indian street food restaurants, up from only about a dozen last year. "We may not be open if they weren’t here. We need bodies."

The proportion of Americans ages 16-19 who are working is higher than it's been in years: In May, 33.2% of them had jobs, the highest such percentage since 2008. Though the figure dipped to 31.9% in June, the Labor Department reported Friday, that is still higher than it was before the pandemic devastated the economy last spring.

At the Cattivella Italian restaurant in Denver, for instance, Harry Hittle, 16, is earning up to $22.50 an hour, including tips, from his job clearing restaurant tables. He's used the windfall to buy gas and insurance for his car and has splurged on a road bike and an electric guitar.

"There's never been a better time to apply for a job if you're a teen," says Mathieu Stevenson, CEO of Snagajob, an online job site for hourly work.

Consider the findings of Neeta Fogg, Paul Harrington and Ishwar Khatiwada, researchers at Drexel University's Center for Labor Markets and Policy who issue an annual forecast for the teenage summer job market. This year, they predict, will be the best summer for teenage lifeguards, ice cream scoopers and sales clerks since 2008; 31.5% of 16- to 19-year-olds will have jobs.

Teenage employment had been on a long slide, leading many analysts to lament the end of summertime jobs that gave teens work experience and a chance to mingle with colleagues and customers from varying backgrounds.

In August 1978, 50% of teenagers were working, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Their employment rate hasn’t been that high since. The figure began a long slide in 2000 and fell especially steeply during the Great Recession. The eruption of coronavirus produced a new low: Only 26.3% of teens had jobs last summer, according to the Drexel researchers.

The long-term drop in teen employment has reflected both broad economic shifts and personal choices. The U.S. economy includes fewer low-skill, entry-level jobs — ready-made for teens — than it did in the 1970s and 1980s. And such jobs that do remain have been increasingly likely to be taken by older workers, many of them foreign born.

In addition, teens from affluent families, eager to secure admission to top universities, have for years chosen summer academic programs over jobs or have pursued ambitious volunteer work in hopes of distinguishing their applications for college. Others have spent their summers playing competitive sports.

This summer, things are rather different. After collapsing last spring, the economy has rebounded much faster than expected. Restaurants, bars, retail shops and amusement parks have been overwhelmed by pent-up demand from consumers who had mostly hunkered down for a year or more.

Now, those businesses need employees to handle the influx and are scrambling to find enough. The vaccine rollout was just starting in April and May, when employers typically start hiring for summer. Some of these businesses delayed their hiring decisions, unsure whether or when the economy would fully reopen.

Foreign workers, brought in on J-1 work-and-study visas, typically filled many such summer jobs. But President Donald Trump suspended those visas as a coronavirus precaution, and the number of U.S.-issued J-1 visas tumbled 69% in the fiscal 2020 year — to 108,510, from 353,279 the year before.

In past years, for example, foreigners visiting the U.S. on visas took filled 180 summer jobs at Big Kahuna's water park in Destin, Florida. Last year, there were just three. This year, eight. Desperate to attract local teens, Big Kahuna's, which is owned by Boomers Parks, is now paying $12 an hour, up from less than $10 an hour in past years.

Compounding the labor squeeze, many older Americans have been slow to respond to a record number of job openings. Some have lingering health concerns or trouble arranging or affording child care at a time when schools are transitioning from remote to in-person learning. Other adults may have been discouraged from seeking work because of generous federal unemployment benefits, though many states have dropped these benefits, and they will end nationwide on Sept. 6.

So businesses are offering signing bonuses and whatever else they can to hire teens in a hurry.

Wendy's, which relies on teens to salt fries and ring up orders, added a way for applicants to apply for a job through their smartphones. Applicants are screened using artificial intelligence, which gets them to an interview faster than if they uploaded a resume. The idea is to hire them before another employer can.

"Speed is critical," said Randy Pianin, CEO of JAE Restaurant Group, a franchisee that owns 220 Wendy’s locations. As a perk, JAE is offering workers a way to get hold of some of their pay the day after they earn it, Pianin said, instead of having to wait two weeks for a paycheck.

Boomers Parks has raised pay at the eight amusement parks it owns and is offering bonuses of up to $50 a week for some teen workers who stay through the summer, CEO Tim Murphy said. With fewer people seemingly willing to take the jobs, Murphy said, competition for workers is fierce.

At its Sahara Sam's water park in West Berlin, New Jersey, the company lowered its minimum working age to 15 from 16 to try to recruit a larger pool of candidates.

Johnathon Miller thought he would need to wait until August, when he turned 16, to start working. But when he heard about a lowered age limit at Sahara Sam’s, he applied — and got the job. He will soon be a lifeguard, watching over the lazy river for $15 an hour, a couple of bucks more an hour than Sahara Sam’s used to pay.

"I’m looking forward to working,” said Miller, who lives in Woolwich Township, New Jersey — so much so that he got a friend interested, too: "He was like, 'Whoa, they are hiring at (age) 15?'"

At Curry Up Now, the restaurant pays $2 an hour above the minimum wage, which is $15 or more an hour, depending on the Bay Area location. The chain is also offering a fund for teens to pay for classes or books, as well as free Zoom classes on how to manage money.

Kapoor concedes that young hires require restaurant training and might not stick around for long. But there are advantages to having teens on staff. They are typically inclined to persuade their friends to work or eat there, giving Curry Up Now a stream of future workers and customers. And they have updated the restaurant’s music, adding more songs from the '80s and '90s as well as tunes from India and the Middle East.

All that said, the revival of teen employment might not last. The pre-pandemic trend toward fewer young workers at restaurants and entertainment venues could reassert itself if the economy's labor shortages are eventually resolved.

Still, Harrington, director of Drexel’s labor markets center, notes that "employers have moved down the labor queue as the labor supply of adults has become more constrained."

If the economic recovery continues to reduce unemployment, and if federal policymakers continue to restrict the influx of low-skilled foreign workers, "then the chances for sustained growth in teen employment rates are good," Harrington said.

___

Pisani reported from New York. AP writer Patty Nieberg contributed to this report from Denver.

The declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday is putting pressure on more U.S. companies to give their employees the day off, accelerating a movement that took off last year in response to the racial justice protests that swept the country.

Hundreds of top companies had already pledged last year to observe Juneteenth in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and the national reckoning on racism that followed.

But most private companies take their cues from the federal government — the country's largest employer — in drawing up their holiday calendars. President Joe Biden signed legislation Thursday establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery, following the passage of a bipartisan Congressional bill.

More than 800 companies have publicly pledged to observe Juneteenth, according to HellaCreative, a group of Black creative professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area that launched a campaign last year to build corporate support for making June 19 an official holiday. That is nearly double the number of companies that had joined the pledge last year.

Patagonia, the outdoor apparel retailer, announced that all of its U.S. stores will be closed Saturday, and its corporate offices would be closed Monday. Other brands, including Target, J.C. Penney and Best Buy had pledged last year to adopt Juneteenth as a paid holiday, though they are keeping stores open. Several major banks have said employees will get a floating paid day off.

Many companies, however, had little time to shuffle their holiday calendars. Some offered employees a regular paid day off or promised to consider adding it to their calendars next year.

Nasdaq said its U.S. exchange would stay open Friday and Monday “to maintain a fair and orderly market and to minimize operational risks” but that it would discuss its future holiday schedule with regulators and companies.

State governments that had not already declared Juneteenth a holiday were also scrambling to respond the new federal holiday. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced that all state government offices will be closed Friday, superseding a state law signed just two days earlier that would have made June 19 a state holiday next year.

Even though federal holidays like Thanksgiving are widely observed, private companies are under no obligation to offer any particular day off. But since many workers don't know that, they will likely wonder why they are not getting a paid holiday for Juneteenth this year, said Carolina Valencia, a vice president in research firm Gartner’s human resource practice.

In an era of increasing employee activism and fierce competition for talent, Valencia said she expects the number of companies offering Juneteenth to surge next year after employers have had more time to react.

“Many employees are going to resent their employers for not giving them the holiday because they don't understand that it's a complicated process,” Valencia said.

But she said the devil will be in the details. Many companies will likely offer it as a floating day off, making it unlikely that Juneteenth will become a national holiday on par with July 4th or Memorial Day anytime soon.

And many notable companies have not joined the movement. Walmart, which employs 300,000 Black hourly workers and is the country’s largest private-sector employer, told The Associated Press in an email that its employees are free to use paid time off to observe any holiday they wish, including Juneteenth.

Raheem Thompson, a social media specialist for a retail company, said he was disappointed he didn't get a paid day off. Instead, he said the company sent an email acknowledging the federal holiday and pledging to consider time off in the future.

“It’s kind of bare minimum," said Thompson, who lives in Atlanta but didn't want his company named for fear of repercussions. “I don’t think as people of color, we really care that you acknowledge it via email ... that doesn’t really have any true meaning to it."

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas — two months after the Confederacy had surrendered. That was also about 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the Southern states.

Black Americans, especially in Texas, have long celebrated Juneteenth with church picnics and speeches. But the federal holiday declaration brought it to the attention of some Americans for the first time.

Jamie Hickey, founder of a small fitness company in Philadelphia, said he had never heard of Juneteenth until he heard about it last week on the radio. Then, his four trainers started talking about it at lunch, and he asked them if it was important to them. He decided to make it a day off next year since it was too late to cancel on clients this year.

“They said, ‘are you serious, you are just now hearing about this?’" said Hickey, who founded Truism Fitness last year after the chain fitness company where he and other trainers worked closed because of the pandemic.

Hickey said he took the lead from his employees because, as a white man, he worried about jumping into trends only to be accused of tokenism.

“I don’t want to fake. If you are fake, you get caught and it’s a million times worse," Hickey said.

That's a major concern among even the biggest employees, said Erin Eve, CEO of Ichor Strategies, which advises firms on connecting businesses with their communities. Eve said companies will get called out by their employees, customers and even investors if they take steps like observing Juneteenth without investing in Black communities or looking at their own internal diversity.

Still, Eve said the declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday will make companies that don't follow suit increasingly look bad.

“For current employees, it will reaffirm a dissonance with their values," Eve said.

___

Associated Press Writers Urooba Jamal, Anne D'Innocenzio, Michelle Chapman and Roger Schneider contributed to this story.

It's been 15 long months since millions of workers left their offices and set up makeshift desks at home.

But as COVID-19 cases decline and more Americans get vaccinated, companies are beginning to establish protocols about how, and whether, office life will resume.

For Wall Street banks, the growing consensus is that everyone ought to be back at their desks by Labor Day — though Citibank said it's embracing more of a hybrid model. Meanwhile, tech companies are taking a far more flexible approach.

As for workers themselves, more than half of those surveyed in a recent Pew Research Center survey said that, given the choice, they would want to keep working from home even after the pandemic subsides.

Here's how some of the biggest names in tech and finance are handling the return to office life.

Apple

Apple expects employees to return to their offices three days a week come September, CEO Tim Cook wrote in an email to employees earlier this month, according to The Verge.

"For all that we've been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other," Cook said in the email. "Video conference calling has narrowed the distance between us, to be sure, but there are things it simply cannot replicate."

Employees are expected to be in the office Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, but those with roles that allow for remote work will have the option to work from home Wednesdays and Fridays. The company is also offering up to two weeks of remote work annually and encouraging, but not requiring, vaccination.

Facebook

Facebook announced earlier this month that employees can apply for remote work if their role allows. Any worker who wants to return to the office may do so on a flexible basis but is encouraged to spend at least half of their time in the office. Employees will also be granted 20 days each year to work from a remote location.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in a memo that he plans to continue working remotely for at least half of the next year, a company spokesperson confirmed to CNN Business.

Google

Until September, Google workers around the world can continue to work remotely before deciding between coming back to their office, working out of a different Google office or applying for full-time remote work.

"The future of work is flexibility," CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a May memo to employees.

Pichai said he expects about 60% of employees to return to their pre-pandemic offices while 20% move to a different office and 20% work from home.

Twitter

Twitter has yet to set an exact start date for welcoming employees back to the office, but it plans to start with a 20% capacity limit.

Early in the pandemic, the company said it plans to let some of its workforce continue working remotely "forever" if they choose.

"If our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen," said Twitter's vice president of people, Jennifer Christie, in a statement to CNN Business. "If not, our offices will be their warm and welcoming selves, with some additional precautions, when we feel it's safe to return."

The company has stressed that it wants employees to have the choice to return to the office, but it anticipates that most workers will opt for a hybrid model, spending some time in the office and some time at home.

Uber

Uber will shift to a hybrid model in September, according to an April blog post from Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company's chief people officer.

Employees at the ride-hailing company are expected in the office three days a week, but they will have the option to work remotely the other two days.

"We feel that this combination of in-person and remote work will give people the freedom to do their best work while staying connected to their colleagues," Krishnamurthy said in the blog post.

Bank of America

Bank of America is encouraging, and expecting, all vaccinated employees to return to the office after Labor Day, CEO Brian Moynihan said this week.

"Our view is all the vaccinated teammates will be back," Moynihan said in a Bloomberg Television interview this week. "We'll be able to operate fairly normally and will then start to make provisions for the other teammates as we move through the fall."

The bank is not mandating employees to report their vaccination status, but it is expecting them to input their status in the company portal.

Citibank

Citi said in March that it recognized how people have benefited from aspects of working remotely, and that it would embrace some flexibility in the return-to-office process.

The bank said it expects up to 30% of U.S. staff to return to the office in July. The majority of Citi workers globally will be designated as "hybrid," working in the office at least three days a week and from home up to two days per week.

Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs welcomed employees back to the office on Monday. The company is expecting 5,400 newly hired interns, analysts and associates in the office in addition to its returning employees.

"We are focused on progressing on our journey to gradually bring our people back together again, where it is safe to do so, and are now in a position to activate the next steps in our return to office strategy," the bank's leadership wrote in a May staff memo.

Leading up to the return to in-person work, Goldman Sachs also mandated that its employees report their vaccination status. While vaccination is not required, the company is encouraging all staff to get vaccinated if possible.

JPMorgan Chase

Last month, JPMorgan opened all of its U.S. offices to employees with a 50% occupancy cap. Executives at the bank informed staff that it expects all U.S.-based employees back in the office by early July on a consistent rotational schedule, subject to the same 50% cap.

"We firmly believe that working together in person is important for our culture, clients, businesses and teams," JPMorgan executives said.

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman took a hard line earlier this week, saying he expects the bank's New York employees back in the office by Labor Day.

"If you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office. And we want you in the office," Gorman said at an investing conference.

The company has not mandated vaccination, but Gorman noted that "well over 90%" of employees had already received their COVID-19 vaccination. That number is expected to hit 98% to 99%, according to Gorman.

The bank will continue to consider returning to the office on a case-by-case basis, Gorman said, recognizing that some employees may not be able to be vaccinated, or may be in a different situation if their office is outside of New York.

American employers added just 266,000 jobs last month, a sharp downturn from March. 

It's a sign businesses are struggling to fill open positions even as the country recovers economically from the pandemic. 

Construction companies and manufacturers, particularly automakers, slowed hiring last month due to parts shortages. 

Meanwhile, the hospitality sector, which includes restaurants, hotels and venues, is basically begging for workers. 

Lots of jobs are going unfilled because people have changed fields or left the workforce during the last year of the pandemic. And of course, some unemployed Americans are still afraid to go back to work due to the coronavirus pandemic and stubbornly high infection rates in certain parts of the country.

"Here we are in an empty dining room where normally, for lunch, we would be open and serving, you know, a couple of hundred guests," business owner Mac Hay said, "But this year, because of our staff shortage, both with U.S. workers but also workers from overseas, we've we can't fill the demand."

In response, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is calling on Washington to immediately stop paying Americans an extra $300 in weekly unemployment benefits. It's saying that boost is incentivizing some Americans to not return to work. 

The group also said the Biden administration's supplemental benefits means about 1 in 4 Americans is making more money unemployed than they earned while they were working.

This story originally reported by Gage Jackson on Newsy.com.

CINCINNATI — Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine during a visit Friday to Cincinnati's West Side offered some speculation on a question many have been asking as COVID-19 vaccine supply begins to outpace demand.

Can an employer mandate their employees receive the coronavirus vaccine?

"I think you're going to see private businesses more inclined maybe to make that an order," DeWine said.

All three types of COVID-19 vaccine available in the U.S. today -- Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson -- are on the market with emergency use authorization. That's just one step away from full approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

With Pfizer now poised to request full approval of its vaccine, it could open doors for employers to compel their employees to receive the vaccine in order to go back to work, DeWine said, because full FDA approval would close some liability loopholes companies currently face if they were to mandate a emergency-approved inoculation.

"I talked to somebody literally two hours ago on the phone, private business," DeWine said Friday. "I wasn't encouraging it or not, and this person said to me, 'July one. We've already told our folks everybody's got to be vaccinated.'"

But business owner Tim Meehan said a vaccine requirement makes him uneasy. He and his partner Halle visited Deerfield Cinema today, enjoying a movie now that they're fully vaccinated themselves.

"I know that's a personal choice," Tim Meehan said. "I think it's important to get the vaccine, but I don't know about forcing employees to get it."

Cincinnati Health Commissioner Melba Moore supports people getting vaccinated but is wary of mandates, too.

"I don't like the stick approach," Moore said. "Let me give you the science and the information, and let's do what we need to do to get back to what this new normal is going to be."

As part of that approach, Moore's health department will throw a block party Saturday in Hartwell at 8725 Vine Street. A vaccine clinic offering the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot will operate from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with walk-up appointments available until 4 p.m. There will be food and live music.