Although the coronavirus pandemic has largely faded into memory, many Connecticut state employees have not returned to the office fulltime.
Instead, some employees are at work, depending on their duties, only once or twice a week.
Gov. Ned Lamont, a fiscally moderate Democrat and former business owner, says he wants the employees back but he does not have the power over unionized employees to make them return.
“I wish I could,” Lamont said recently during a radio interview. “I lost in arbitration. It will come up in our negotiation.”
The radio interviewer, Brian Schactman, interrupted and expressed surprise that getting back to work needed to be negotiated.
“Everything is friggin’ collectively bargained, including being in the office,” Lamont responded. “More and more of our folks are voluntarily coming back, but I need everybody back in the office.”
At 71, Lamont remembers the days when no one worked at home and all workers were expected to arrive at the office with their colleagues five days a week.
“I come from a generation where the marriage vows were for better or for worse, but not for lunch,” Lamont said. “I’m going to push again. I know what it means for the workforce. Look, I was an employer in my previous life, as well. You want to be flexible. You want to treat your employees right. It’s another reason to work for state government — that we look after you. But I need you in the office more often.”
Lamont’s comments were initially prompted by a caller who said that having thousands of employees returning to the office buildings in Hartford would help the local restaurants and generate economic activity in the now often-empty downtown area.
For years, state employee unions tried to provide more flexibility to allow employees to work at home in jobs that could be easily done on a computer. The rules are different for employees who need to physically arrive every day, including state troopers who patrol the highways and correction officers in the prisons.
In a long-running issue, an arbitrator issued a 38-page ruling in favor of the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition in December 2021 that said “the determination of an agency to refuse to grant telework above an amount that would provide one day per workweek at the worksite shall not be subject to arbitration under this policy.”
The arbitrator noted that SEBAC “argues that telework is not just a common good, but also, a bargained-for benefit.”
SEBAC says that productivity is up among state employees and the work-at-home policy is an important tool for recruitment and retention.
Expanding the debate on the issue, the legislature’s Democratic-controlled labor committee will hold a public hearing Thursday on a bill by House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford that is called “an act authorizing state agencies to require employees to work in person.”
Wilfredo T. Medina, president of AFSCME Local 714, has already submitted written testimony against the bill, saying that the 1,400 employees he represents at the state Department of Social Services have been working efficiently from remote settings.
“This bill fails to recognize the operational and financial benefits of remote work, including reducing costs associated with office space, utilities, and commuting,” Medina wrote. “Furthermore, remote work has been shown to increase employee productivity and well-being, without sacrificing the quality of services to the public.”
But Candelora says that the state employees need to be in the office to provide proper service for the general public, adding that he has seen no data or reports that productivity has increased.
As the pandemic has ended, employers nationwide have been urging workers to get back into the office. Some employees have pushed back after realizing how much time they had spent either driving to work or sitting for long rides on commuter trains. The continuing work-at-home trend has led to large amounts of empty space in office towers from Hartford and New York City to Chicago and San Francisco.
In Manhattan, JP Morgan Chase chief executive officer Jamie Dimon has received pushback from 1,300 employees who signed a petition that the mega-bank should retain its hybrid working conditions. Dimon, though, says workers need to get back to the office — in the same way that investment bank Goldman Sachs called for employees to be back five days a week nearly three years ago. Dimon was quoted recently as saying he had difficulty reaching some of his own employees on Fridays because they were working at home.
In Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office that said supervisors “shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”
In an update to a long-running issue, Lamont and the unions clashed again one year ago during a substantial snowstorm on Feb. 13, 2024.
At the time, Lamont closed the state’s executive branch offices and sent a directive to non-essential state employees, now known as Level 2, that they should work remotely instead.
Lamont wrote, “All level 2 executive branch state employees whose job duties can be completed remotely should telework, or they may request use of accrued leave.”
But SEBAC said that Lamont had misconstrued the state’s nine-page telework policy, which was negotiated in a joint agreement by SEBAC and the state.
The problem, according to SEBAC, is the agreement states that the employee — not Lamont — would have the option to decide on whether they should work remotely on that particular day.
“On February 13th, Governor Lamont closed executive branch offices due to a snowstorm, and as he did in 2023, he is continuing to improperly apply the state’s telework agreement with the unions,” SEBAC wrote on the day of the snowstorm.
The coalition added, “SEBAC already has a grievance awaiting arbitration on this very issue relating to a prior incident in 2023 and while SEBAC does not recommend that employees ignore the governor/agency directive to telework if they are capable of doing so or request use of accrued leave, we will be filing another grievance based on this most recent directive, and we will seek to recover the time.”
Despite any concerns, Drew Stoner Phelan, a spokeswoman for SEBAC, said that telework has been a success.
“The majority of state employees don’t telework at all, and those that do have their amount of telework approved by their managers or through a neutral arbitrator,” she said. “The overwhelming evidence from both employees and managers demonstrates that telework has been a success, benefitting both the state and its workforce – not to mention the positive impacts to the environment and traffic congestion.”
She added, “Forcing a return to the office for the sake of optics, rather than operational necessity, ignores the reality that flexible work arrangements have strengthened workforce retention, reduced costs and ensured uninterrupted public services.”
Senate Republican leader Stephen Harding of Brookfield said some of his constituents have complained that they cannot reach state employees because no one answers the phone at some departments.
“That was one of my biggest gripes with the last collective bargaining agreement that we agreed to increase salaries quite significantly, and in that same deal did not require them to go back to work fulltime,” Harding told The Courant in an interview. “I’ve heard stories that some employees are only coming in once a week, twice a week. It has to cut down on productivity. I hear from constituents all the time, post-pandemic, that they’ll call departments and they’ll get voicemails and will never get call-backs. They’re basically told that no one is there.”
The current telework policy is scheduled to last until 2027, officials said.
“The pandemic has been over for the better part of three years at this point, thankfully,” Harding said. “There is no logistical reason as to why these employees should not be back in the office. You can’t tell me people are getting the same level of service while that employee is at home, as opposed to them in the office in a setting working with their peers. I think it’s high time that state employees come back to work fulltime and serve the people in person like they did prior to COVID.”
With the end of the pandemic, Harding says it is time to drop teleworking.
“I say scrap it, and bring the folks back to work,” Harding said. “If individuals are dealing with day care issues for a day, if someone wants to request to telework for a day here and there, I understand that. But it can’t become a repeated, regular occurrence where they only have to come into the office once a week. You’re actually working from home more days than you are in the office. In some departments, employees are literally coming in one day a week. That, to me, is unacceptable.”
Candelora agreed, saying that state service is different than the private sector and requires in-person work to serve the general public.
“For good government, we should be getting people back into buildings,” Candelora said. “Government is a service-oriented business. You can’t do it from your living room. … If you want a remote job, there’s plenty of companies out there that would provide remote work for you and I think you could get that job. But to expect government to be completely remote, it’s just irresponsible.”
