Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
A woman crosses a relatively quiet Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, on July 3, 2023, in Washington.
Biden Cabinet officials have a delicate balancing act on their hands as they try to damp down the ongoing political brushfire over whether Washington-based federal workers do their jobs at home or in the center of the city. Last week, Jeff Zients, President Biden’s chief of staff, underlined his boss’s expectation that federal department heads “aggressively execute” plans to have more people on-site this fall. The administration had already spotlighted its intentions in an April Office of Personnel Management directive that nodded to the value of remote work while also pivoting to more “meaningful in-person work,” a fact underscored in May with the end of the public COVID emergency.
Republicans in Congress also want federal employees to head back to offices, and they are prepared to stereotype federal workers as slackers who need to be in the office to do their jobs (a ploy to turn out their anti-government voters). The Trump administration had begun to cut back federal employees’ telework scheduling, which the Obama administration had encouraged, only to abandon those plans as the pandemic surged. The House has already passed a bill to compel federal agencies to adopt pre-pandemic work-from-home policies as well as to conduct studies of how telework affected customer service and other metrics that they contend have suffered in the past several years. Senate Republicans introduced a dead-on-arrival companion bill in May, so that plan won’t move forward.
Not to be outdone, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg jumped into the fray last week with a Washington Post op-ed that heaped scorn on remote federal workers for poor customer service in certain public-facing agencies. He neglected to address the increased burden on those workers—and the effects on response time—due to widespread retirements and private-sector competition for talented and veteran federal employees.
Bosses demanding in-person work is already an antiquated construct in certain white-collar jobs. Neither the federal government nor private-sector employers can make unreasonable calls for in-person face time unless they want to see an exodus of the skilled and the seasoned. Even Zoom, the videoconferencing platform that made the work-from-home (WFH) revolution possible, is only requiring at least two days per week from employees who live within 50 miles of company offices.
Hybrid arrangements are now permanent features of the federal workplace just as they are in the private sector. That’s a fact of life that some members of Congress and business leaders prefer to gloss over. Washington is not the only major metro area that is experience an anemic downtown recovery. Most federal employees—85 percent—actually work outside Washington, but the capital city is one of the few places where Congress, the president, the mayor, and local business leaders can all jockey for advantage on working conditions for huge numbers of people.
Hybrid arrangements are now permanent features of the federal workplace just as they are in the private sector.
“This is a workforce that people think that they can exert political pressure to force back to the office,” says Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents about 750,000 federal government workers and District of Columbia government employees. “But guess what, Michael Bloomberg: Some of the federal workforce is unionized. We have collective-bargaining agreements and the proper place for those decisions to get hammered out is at the bargaining table, not because a billionaire says that’s what best.”
More than half of civilian federal jobs are in unionized bargaining units. By law, federal workers cannot negotiate pay scales or benefits, but they do have considerable power over their working conditions, which are the primary focus of federal employees’ collective bargaining. But neither the administration nor Congress seems to fully realize that threats and hyperbole are not going to compel federal workers to return to office jobs that no longer meet their professional goals and personal needs any more than similar demands do with private-sector employees.
Congress and the general public all too often regard federal workers as interchangeable cells in a hive mind. But the federal workforce is not a monolith and there are huge differences in telework and remote work polices within and between agencies in large departments like Defense or Homeland Security and smaller ones like the National Endowment for the Arts or the Federal Maritime Commission.
“Management hasn’t been just sitting there saying, you want to telework full time? Sure, whatever you want. That’s not how bargaining has gone,” Simon notes. (Most AFGE members work in the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and the Social Security Administration.) “More than half of our membership reported to their duty station [job sites] every day throughout the pandemic,” she says. “I’m talking about people who work in VA hospitals and people who work in federal prisons, border patrol agents—any kind of job like that is a job that is not eligible for telework.”
The federal government’s telework policies allow an employee to work in another location, other than their job site, such as their home, for a certain number of days each pay period. A remote position allows a worker to work exclusively at home. Moreover, many employees are already working hybrid schedules, Simon notes, and may not necessarily be affected by the new push for in-office compliance.
Telework varies by agency but is closely tied to a particular job’s demands, which govern how many times per pay period an employee is required to come to a job site and the kinds of resources such as internet, office supplies, and the like that the agency is providing to the teleworker. “I don’t think there are two [agency] contracts that have identical language on telework,” she says.
With federal work known as low-salaried/good benefits employment, many federal managers know that with their ongoing recruitment and retention challenges, hybrid schedules actually help them compete with private-sector employers. Simon explains there is about a 25 percent pay gap, or more, between the federal and private-sector salaries for the same jobs, especially in large cities.
“The Future of WFH,” a report by Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom, finds about one-third of all professional and managerial workers are in hybrid positions—and happiness in those jobs, as exemplified by recruitment and retention trends, is the key appeal of working from home. For employees who are fully remote, a demand for more in-office face time may be “reasonable,” Bloom said in an email to the Prospect. “The evidence is that hybrid is helpful for mentoring, productivity and building culture,” he said. “This is likely particularly true for government work where it is hard to measure output, so managing employees remotely is particularly challenging.” The Stanford report also found that only about one-quarter of younger employees aged 20 to 29 want full-time remote work, compared to 41 percent among workers aged 50 to 64.
Compounding the battle over federal workers who work at home is the criticism leveled at WFH by Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and local business leaders as they attempt to resuscitate a downtown economy that is only limping along. Washington has seen a modest uptick in some economic indicators like sales tax revenues that rose due to robust seasonal tourism. But property tax revenues continue to take a hit as assessments plummet, thanks to the declining property values of ever more vacant office buildings. Falling tax revenues are a major concern, a factoid underlined by Washington’s chief financial officer earlier this year.
Conflating the needs of downtown economies with the presence of federal employees may end up being a losing proposition. Washington civic leaders and the Biden administration have been comparatively quiet with “come back downtown” pleas when they pertain to the multitude of private law, accounting, and consulting firms that swirl around the federal government. “I disagree with having the excuse that ‘city centers are empty and we need to fill office space,’” says Bloom. “The government should not be bailing out big office blocks and real estate companies.”
Even Washington civic leaders grudgingly realize that the city cannot wring its hands forever over the departed feds. This summer, they went to Plan B, hosting a “DC Downtown Futuring Workshop” that plainly acknowledges that central areas like the Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House and the Pennsylvania Avenue blocks where the federal office buildings and monuments dominate must be revisioned to attract new people and develop fresh uses.
