Last August, three and a half years after the pandemic sent millions of government workers home, President Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, told federal agencies to “aggressively execute” a pivot to in-person work. .
In January of this year, Zients sent an email to Cabinet members: The agencies “are not where they need to be. … I ask you to double your leadership to increase in-person work.”
In April of this year, in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington, Zients said: “We still do not have the levels of return to work that we should have across the federal government.”
This summer marks four and a half years since Covid-19 altered the meaning and location of work for many Americans. Most people are back at work, most of the time. But government workers largely remain at home, to the point that 17 of 24 federal agencies were using only about a quarter of their headquarters office space last summer, a Government Accountability Office Report found.
The president has urged workers to put on their shoes and return downtown, but it’s not working. Taxpayers shell out about $5 billion a year to rent offices for federal employees, plus another $2 billion to operate those buildings and the more than 500 million square feet of office space owned by Uncle Sam.
I thought at least one political party would have realized that this was a pretty scandalous situation. Campaign ads about massive waste write themselves, as anyone can see if they walk down K Street NW or in the Federal Triangle, passing closed stores and empty sidewalks, especially on Mondays and Fridays… and Tuesdays and Thursdays. Wednesdays are not good either.
Inside offices, some very high-quality air conditioners operate in sparsely populated rooms: just under half of all workers (public and private sectors combined) now report to their D.C. offices, down slightly from before the pandemic, according to card swipe counts by Kastle Systems.
The numbers for public employees alone are devastating: only 6 percent of federal workers work full time in their offices; 30 percent are completely remote, according to a Federal News Network Survey this spring. Some agencies are using less than 10 percent of your space.
That’s fine for most workers. A Report from the Office of Personnel Management found that 84 percent of employees and managers believe that staying home improves the quality of their work.
“People are coming back to the office more and more days, but to say the least, it’s not very practical or popular,” said Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents about 750,000 federal workers. and from DC. “They worked heroically throughout the pandemic. The idea that they have to go to the office to please Jeff Zients is absurd.”
Outrage over the workers’ absence extends beyond Zients and appears to be at least somewhat bipartisan. If agencies do not require workers to return, perhaps the law can force them to return. Enter Senators Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Joe Manchin III (DW.Va.), whose Back to work law It would require the feds to be in person at least 60 percent of the time.
It’s not just conservative lawmakers who are dismayed by the waste of tax money. Democratic mayors have watched in horror as tax bases crumble and urban centers empty. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker (D) last month ordered All city workers back to their pre-pandemic schedules, starting in July.
In D.C., Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has called on the White House to take “decisive action” to return federal workers to their offices or “realign their vast properties for use by local government,” organizations without for-profits, businesses or anyone willing to reuse the space.
Zients says working in person is vital to “building a strong culture,” increasing productivity and training new employees.
Simon agrees that “there are benefits to being in person” and describes how in-person training for a new, young coworker makes a difference. But she puts limits on making workers bear the burden of increasing the tax base. Government workers “have no obligation to support downtown restaurants,” he said.
Biden promised in his 2022 State of the Union address that “the vast majority of federal workers will return to work in person.” Progress toward that goal remains glacial. Changes must be negotiated with the unions. Agencies have proposed increasing in-person attendance to between two days a week and four days a week, but some have lowered the proposed minimums in response to union objections.
Management is mostly on board with the basics, Simon said: “They almost apologize at the negotiating table.”
The impulse to stay home is powerful. After four years of working steps from the refrigerator, my work pants no longer fit. An hour on the Metro to get home is much less attractive than a trip from the couch to the kitchen. And it’s hugely frustrating to arrive and find the office virtually empty, negating any inspiring benefits of being with other people.
But ideas flourish and serendipitous moments produce creative work when people share a common space. Workers at the Department of Labor’s Boston office know this deep down. So when they protested plans to force them back into the office this spring, they didn’t do it on Zoom. They went back to the office.
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