Thousands of WeWork Phone Booths Contaminated with Formaldehyde

WeWork is going through something of a tumultuous time at the minute. Between a canceled IPO, reports that thousands of people will be laid off, a plummet in the valuation, and chunks of their business being sold off, things haven’t been easy for cofounder and CEO Adam Neumann. Now it seems the one thing that WeWork produces in house – their phone booths – are another problem to be added to the list. 

The New York Times reported that the company would be removing over 2,000 phone booths from their coworking spaces due to contamination with dangerous chemicals. WeWork didn’t issue a response by press time, but the company did write an open letter to tenants across the United States and Canada that they would be investigating complaints of “odor and eye irritation,” symptoms of formaldehyde exposure. 

WeWork proceeded to hire an outside consultant to test their phone booths. The consultant identified nearly 1,600 phone booths that could be contaminated. Those phone booths – along with another 700 that are considered safe – will be removed as the company continues their tests. 

The letter – which has since been posted on Twitter – said the manufacturer was the cause of the chemical contamination. The problem with that? Well, according to WeWork themselves, they are the manufacturers of the phone booths. They’ve effectively thrown themselves under the bus. 

Bad month for wework. Now they’re removing a bunch of phone booths in our building b/c of formaldehyde concerns. Over under on us getting our security deposit back when we move out later this month? pic.twitter.com/OZa81QUOdR

— Rachel Z. Kaplowitz (@ZisserZappy) October 14, 2019

“It’s our own product,” said WeWork VP of Workplace Strategy Liz Burrow in 2018. “That’s the brilliance of it. We said, ‘We spend all this money on it, it’s so popular, we should just build it for ourselves.’”. 

Burrow explained the company built their own phone booths because they realized that the most expensive square-foot cost for construction was small meeting rooms where people could take private phone calls. They decided to make these “rooms” a piece of furniture that can then be moved freely. 

The phone booths were a hit as WeWork coworking spaces don’t offer too much in privacy.

While WeWork claims that they manufacture the phone booths in-house, they could be blaming the formaldehyde risk on outside third-party contractors. They may also be blaming the actual factory that the booths are fabricated in. The company hasn’t disclosed how many phone booths they have built in total, or why only some of them had been affected by formaldehyde. 

This formaldehyde problem is just the latest in a series of unfortunate events for the company, which reportedly doesn’t have the money necessary to continue operations after 2019.