President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to fire thousands of federal workers unless they return to their office spaces will be met with fierce resistance from employees – and their union contracts, according to a Washington Post report.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a rise in companies moving employees to work-from-home schedules and some have yet to return to their offices – including scores of federal employees who Trump vowed to fire last week unless they come back.
But putting an end to pandemic-era policies and ushering in even stricter federal office guidelines likely won’t come “with the stroke of a presidential pen,” according to reporter Lisa Rein.
“Trump’s expected return-to-office mandate faces furious resistance from federal employees, many of whom are covered by union agreements that guarantee work-from-home policies — including some contracts extended in recent weeks by outgoing Biden officials eager to blunt Trump’s impact on the workforce,” Rein wrote in the WaPo report.
Collective bargaining contracts, many of which include provisions for telework, are extended to about 56 percent of the civil service – and a record 10 percent of federal jobs are designed as fully remote, the report said.
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“It’s in a lot of labor contracts,” Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union representing federal workers, told the publication of the telework arrangements. “And at a lot of these agencies, the reality is, they don’t have the place to put people to force them back five days a week.”
McQuiston predicted that return-to-office mandates would also be extremely costly and undercut the Trump administration’s goal to cut government spending and personnel.
Besides the challenge of union contracts, Trump’s work-from-home mandate will encounter one more hurdle: a lack of space at some agencies for employees to work.
“According to the report issued by the OMB in August, departments including the U.S. Agency for International Development, Justice, Veterans Affairs, Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency have reduced their real estate footprints since the pandemic emergency ended — and plan to shed still more square footage, with officials citing low employee occupancy as a prime factor,” according to the Post.
