CA state workers savor return-to-office relief, even if it was last minute

On what was supposed to be the first day of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to return to pre-pandemic working conditions, a steady stream of state workers poured into government offices Tuesday morning for one of their in-person workdays.

But instead of four days in office, nearly all public employees who have the ability to telework can continue doing so at the same rate as the past year, after Gov. Gavin Newsom traded state bargaining units another year of remote work for millions in savings related to employee compensation to help plug California’s deficit.

Outside the Natural Resources Agency building on Tuesday morning, state workers coming to the office said they were pleased that the mandate had been paused, but several criticized how the administration’s last-minute change created whiplash in government workers’ lives.

“Relief,” was the one word description someone said before rushing into the gleaming government building.

While he prefers to work from home, Felipe Garcia said that if he had been required to be in office four days a week, “so be it.”

But the senior engineer with the Department of Water Resources said he had empathy for people who need to plan ahead and were expected to return to offices for most of the week as recently as this past weekend, when the start’s largest public sector union secured a delay for its members.

Additionally, Garcia said the return-to-office push allowed Newsom to make bargaining demands that unions might not have accepted, such as a leave program that reduces workers’ salary for time off.

“In a way I feel like he’s being rewarded for what I feel is unfair bargaining,” he said.

Matthias Kimball, a senior engineer with the Department of Water Resources, said not having to commute four days a week was an economic relief.

As a supervisor, Kimball isn’t directly represented by a union but he is related to the Professional Engineers in California Government because of the work he does. The state engineers was the first bargaining unit to secure a one-year delay to the return-to-office order, which Kimball said was sufficient notice.

Other state workers, while relieved for the time being, were quick to point out that the pause is only for a year. Several added that the side letters their bargaining units signed included language that protects departments’ ability to alter employees’ telework agreements, as long as those new arrangements don’t violate labor contracts.

They expressed concerns that in several months departments will turn around and ask employees to come into offices independent of the governor’s now largely suspended return-to-office order.