State workers aren’t ready to return to the office for reasons that range from not enough office space to personal issues, like finding child care and having to endure long commutes.
“People are having no luck finding adjustments to their child care needs if they have to come into the office, and these are people that are -- by the nature of their work, they don’t need to be in the office. They work in front of the computer, on the phone,” Communications Workers of America Union’s local branch President Dan Secrist told KRQE News.
Although the plan to bring state workers back to the office has been delayed until next month, union officials say there is confusion about the process. Workers and their union representatives argue there isn’t enough time to properly implement a plan -- and that the state’s plan isn’t a plan at all. Secrist said state officials weren’t ready when state employees were first instructed to return to work on Jan. 3. A delay until February was negotiated, but that may not be enough time.
“We had managers telling us, ‘I have no place to put these folks,’” Secrist told KRQE News. “We gave up the office space that these positions would have been assigned to originally.”
Secrist believes the urgency to return to workers to the office was the result of this Legislative Finance Committee meeting in November where Department of General Services Cabinet Secretary John Garcia talked about excessive empty office space and how much it was costing the state.
“People are going to come back to work. FMD (Facilities Management Division) has not taken any space away from anybody that was teleworking because telework is temporary. So people are going to come back; the buildings will be used to, hopefully, capacity,” Garcia said at the meeting, according to KRQE News.
On the other side of the coin, Secrist claimed some positions were advertised as telework positions, and those employees believed they were being hired to work remotely.
“They have people in remote locations that they were hired during the telework phase with the understanding that they would be teleworking, who now are basically a 100-mile or more commute.”
Secrist said they feel there should have been a negotiation per their contract, and in many cases, teleworking is just as effective as being in an actual office. He also thinks this change could push people away from working for the state in the midst of the ongoing staffing crisis.
“This is a complete reversal of what we already had agreed to. We had a good policy in place that allowed flexibility to meet the needs of the job for people,” Secrist told KRQE News.
According to state's records, as of Dec. 23, about 34% of state employees were working from home, most only part-time.
