To protect public safety during coronavirus, let government employees work from home

Government bureaucracies are not known for their ability to quickly or nimbly navigate change. That’s still no excuse for lumbering response times and fuzzy decision-making in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

Yet two weeks after both Sacramento County and the state of California announced public stay-at-home orders to slow the virus’ spread, many county and state workers continue to stream into their offices. Some say they could do their jobs from home, but their superiors force them to report to their desks.

Such decisions may prove fateful. Last week, a worker in the Sacramento County Department of Child, Family and Health Services tested positive for the coronavirus. The employee “potentially exposed others in at least three county buildings to the virus before staying home from work beginning March 18,” according to an email by department director Michelle Callejas obtained by The Sacramento Bee. The infected employee visited at least three county buildings where they had the potential to spread the infection to others.

“The positive test realizes a fear county employees have voiced in recent weeks -- with many deemed ‘essential’ and required to continue working from the office, they’re continuing to put themselves, their families and their clients at risk,” wrote The Bee’s Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks.

Among those being forced to come into the office: clerical staff and social workers, many of whom say they could just as easily work from home.

“Do we need 50, 60 people in the office? Can we do a rotation?” said Ted Somera, who leads the largest union representing county employees. “There’s a lot of general fear, of them getting the virus (at work) and taking it home to their family.”

Things are not much better for state workers. CalHR, the state’s department of human resources, issued guidelines for telecommuting in March. But it left decision-making up to each department, resulting in a patchwork of practices. After CalHR released its guidelines, state workers contacted The Bee to express frustration that their work-from-home requests had not been approved.

“Many state workers say they are facing resistance, confusion and uneven responses when they ask to work remotely,” wrote Wes Venteicher, The Bee’s State Worker reporter.

“It’s a scary and difficult time and you’d like to think that the state of California departments were moving to adhere to the governor’s executive order to stay at home and protect public health,” said Ted Toppin, executive director of the union Professional Engineers in California Government, which represents Caltrans engineers. “And for the state to do that, that means to put their employees to work at home. But we know this: State government is a battleship. It is very slow.”

A decade ago, the state’s Office of Emergency Services issued guidelines promoting “telework” as a way to improve “performance, morale, health and wellness” as well as the “effective continuation of business” in an emergency. In 2009, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services went so far as to task each state agency and department with developing plans to work remotely during a pandemic.

But it appears ten years was not enough time for California to prepare state workers to do their jobs from home, as almost every other office worker in the world is doing today. And while the in-office presence of some workers may be necessary, this seems like a situation where supervisors should err on the side of caution.

But that’s not how government bureaucrats think.

“The culture is based on showing up at the office,” Ted Pilot, a former California state worker, told Venteicher. “That’s considered working. Whether you’re doing anything or not, presence at the office is paramount.”

With coronavirus cases rising in California, government officials must protect public health by letting employees work from home to the greatest degree possible. Hopefully, it won’t take a tragedy for our governments to make common sense the standard operating procedure in a pandemic.