Tens of thousands of California state employees were part of a major shift to telework when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in March 2020.
But many of those workers may have to return to the office at least two days per week under new hybrid work policies being rolled out by various agencies this spring.
The move is angering many in the civil workforce. Dozens of state employees braved a downpour in downtown Sacramento on Friday afternoon to protest the decision outside the building that houses Governor Gavin Newsom’s office.
Working from home for four years “has been fantastic,” said Steven Sander, who works on climate change policy for the state. “I feel like I get a lot more stuff done because there are fewer distractions.”
Sander declined to name the agency he works for but said it is trying to get Calfiornians to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. “It doesn’t make any policy sense [or] environmental sense” for his employer to call workers back to the office, he said.
Staff memos to several large state agencies – including the Employment Development Department, Health and Human Services agency, Environmental Protection Agency and others – outline plans to bring all employees back to the office a minimum of two days per week. Some hybrid plans will be implemented as soon as this month.
Since 2020, some employees have planned their lives around the flexibility of telework, moving further away from their offices or selling vehicles.
“We have members who have moved away, in some cases moved cities away” to find more affordable housing, said Anica Walls, Vice President for Organizing with SEIU Local 1000, which represents 96,000 state employees.
“We’re also hearing about situations where [workers] were promised one thing” — that their position would be remote-only — “and now they’re being returned back to the office,” she said.
About half of the state’s workforce is eligible to work primarily from home, according to a state dashboard that tracks telework. Of those workers, the vast majority — about 74% — choose to work from home. That accounts for about 74,000 members of the state’s employees.
“The vast majority of our members have said [they] want to continue working at home,” said Tim O’Connor, president of CASE, a labor union representing about 4,500 attorneys and judicial employees who work for the state.
Though some employees still prefer going into the office, O’Connor, who works as a lawyer for the State Compensation Insurance Fund, said overall telework has “been great for productivity. The pandemic proved that we could succeed and get the job done.”
The union has tracked retention across 10 state agencies that moved to bring employees back into the office earlier in the pandemic. Numbers provided to CapRadio show 45 vacant attorney positions across those agencies in March 2020 compared to 431 vacancies in fall of 2023.
Why now?
Labor unions question the timing of the move, nearly four years into a telework system now preferred by tens of thousands of workers.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has previously called for the state to bring workers back, writing in a recent column that the move would “help" downtown’s ongoing economic recovery.
However, Newsom has previously touted the benefits of telework on employee retention and the environment.
According to the administration’s telework dashboard, employee telework saved nearly 393,000 metric tons of carbon emissions during the 26 months tracked.
Communications from agency leaders hint at the governor’s involvement in a sudden shift to hybrid.
In a memo to employees with the California Department of Public Health, Director Tomás Aragón wrote the shift is “a statewide policy impacting all agencies/departments under the Newsom Administration.”
An EDD document also stated the change to hybrid was happening “in alignment with other state agencies.”
Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon said state agencies and departments “have been directed to regularly evaluate and update their approach to telework in a new hybrid work environment, based on their individual needs. Our office believes there is significant value from in-person work that should be considered along with the benefits of telework."
Mellon did not respond to questions about the agency memos describing the hybrid work shift as administration-wide.
Several state agencies, including Health and Human Services, EDD, and CalEPA, declined interview requests for this story.
“I think the governor's office does have something to do with it,” said O’Connor of the state attorneys union. “The best we can tell, it's got to be coming from the top. And if it isn't, the buck should stop at the governor.”
With a $73 billion budget deficit, some workers wondered whether the shift was financially-motivated, but questioned whether the state would end up paying more for updated office space and equipment.
In Newsom’s January budget proposal, he noted the state could save $51.2 million if a telework stipend for state employees is eliminated beginning in July. That would have to be negotiated with labor unions under their existing contracts.
As a working condition, unions say telework is subject to bargaining. The state attorneys’ union, CASE, has been trying to bargain with state agencies through forced arbitration since 2021, when a first wave of agencies moved to call their employees back into the office a set number of days per week.
