Butts in seats downtown for "The Economy" (aka commercial real estate & fossil fuel)
RTO GTFO. The future of our civilization depends on maximizing remote options wherever possible.
It’s very peculiar that “futurist” tech tycoons are pushing against remote work, isn’t it?
✏️Write reps. My letter to reps:
Maximum Telework for government workers, and others, should continue for our future, in order to promote disability accessibility, stop infectious disease spread, and prioritize our move away from squandering fossil fuel energy on pointless and unhealthy commutes. Working from home works, it’s been shown to be equal or superior for a range of positions. It's going to need to work even more if we want a functional future civilization and the essential job positions filled. Prioritize and promote telework for all, now, and going forward.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Government Executive - House Oversight Republicans open Congress with rants against telework, unions - The first hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was ostensibly about telework yet frequently devolved into anti-union rhetoric. January 15, 2025 Erich Wagner GOP lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened the year in much the same way they spent the last two years: railing against telework and unions at federal agencies. At a hearing Wednesday entitled ‘The Stay-at-Home Federal Workforce,’ Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., blamed customer service backlogs that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as those experienced at the Social Security Administration, as the result of Biden administration officials coddling federal workers with a perk—telework—that allowed them to shirk their duties. “When President Trump’s team enters federal agency office headquarters in and around Washington, D.C., they’ll find them to be mostly empty,” Comer said. “That’s due to the Biden administration’s failure to end pandemic-era telework and bring federal employees back to the office.” As has been the case with other congressional Republican efforts to portray telework and remote work as antithetical to productivity, however, their rhetoric does not align with the facts.
Lawmakers in Washington DC, and seemingly DOGE Dept. associated cronies, are again trying to prohibit all remote work for the federal workforce. This makes no sense in a modern society that needs to be ready for the future, and makes no sense in terms of attracting appropriate talent to government jobs.
Federal telework would be capped under a new House bill Rep. Andy Ogles’ Show Up To Work Act would limit telework at federal agencies to 25% per pay period and require agency heads to certify performance gains for individual waivers. December 10, 2024 02:27 PM ET Carten Cordell Managing Editor, Government Executive The battle over federal telework has been gradually heating up, as both the Biden administration and congressional Republicans have pressed for their versions of return-to-office policies. In Congress, GOP legislators have pitched a series of bills that call for reducing telework through methods like cutting locality pay for employees who telework for at least one day per pay period or returning it to pre-pandemic levels. The debate has reached a fever pitch recently with the incoming administration and its proposed non-government advisory panel dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, with its heads, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, calling for telework reductions as a method of attrition to help winnow the size of the federal civilian workforce.
Government workers want workplace flexibility that has already been proven to work.
Government Executive - SSA, AFGE reach deal to lock in current telework levels until 2029 Union leaders said that for many, the workplace flexibility is the only thing preventing a mass exodus of overworked employees from the embattled agency. December 6, 2024 Erich Wagner Under the agreement, which was first reported by Bloomberg News, most agency employees will continue to allowed to telework between two and five days per week, depending on their occupation. Field office workers are allowed two days of telework per week, while most Office of Hearings Operations employees work between three and four days per week from home. Remote workers make up 1.3% of the agency's workforce. In an internal message to members last week that was ultimately shared on social media, AFGE SSA General Committee Spokesman Rich Couture thanked former Commissioner Martin O’Malley, who resigned last week in order to run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and stressed that the current telework policy is a key tool in the agency’s fight against attrition amid declining budgets and a 50-year staffing low.
They have made it clear that telework flexibility is the only thing preventing labor shortages. And yet lawmakers are determined to end it.
Government Executive - Congressional Republicans dial up multiple bills to cull telework flexibility The 119th Congress has started early on reintroducing or debuting new plans to reduce telework capabilities at federal agencies. January 15, 2025 Carten Cordell The legislation coincides with the anticipated efforts of the incoming Trump administration to address telework as part of its broader campaign to make the federal government more efficient and its workforce smaller. Here’s a rundown of the bills introduced so far:...
This happened with state agencies in Pennsylvania, after the PA Department of Human Services was particularly unaccommodating to workers from the get-go in the pandemic, late to provide remote options, cut back telework as fast as they could - especially in cities where they wanted butts in seats downtown for the economy, refused disability accommodations for telework, and forced senior experienced people into early retirements, and causing a chronic staffing shortage that I have heard continues to this day.
Spotlight PA: Pa. faces a shortage of benefits workers as health coverage for thousands is on the line. by Katie Meyer of Spotlight PA | April 3, 2023 “During the pandemic, many CAO staff retired,” Keenan said. “That means that many of the workers are new to the role and inexperienced. On top of that, they’re likely already flooded with work since so many positions remain unfilled.”
Going backwards is a choice.
KGOU - Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt ends state employee telework options By Paul Monies, Oklahoma Watch Published December 20, 2024 The latest statewide employee engagement survey, issued by OMES in July, showed widespread satisfaction with telework or a hybrid arrangement. The survey had responses from 16,000 employees across 111 state agencies. “Respondents indicating either hybrid or full-time telework had slightly higher favorable responses related to engagement and satisfaction,” the report said. “Among those indicating a full-time or hybrid telework status, engagement is slightly higher and satisfaction is slightly lower among employees working hybrid schedules.” Musk and Ramaswamy said in a Wall Street Journal opinion column last month their reform project, which they dubbed the Department of Governmental Efficiency, could lead to lower costs if the federal government got rid of telework.
It’s very peculiar that “futurist” tech tycoons are pushing against remote work, isn’t it? Of course fossil fuel industry and commercial real estate interests obviously want butts in seats downtown for the sake of their profits.
We know by now that Return To Office is not about productivity. We know it’s not about “taxpayer money spent on empty office space” because there’s a simple fix to that - sell it or stop renting what is no longer needed! But that would not help the commercial real estate industry, right. It won’t benefit businesspeople who hope to be making money off the taxpayers and various businesses and organizations locked into commercial rentals. The fossil fuel industry wants everyone stuck in traffic wasting fuel for 1-3 hours per day, because that’s profit. And mayors and other politicians have this ridiculous hope that if they can just force butts in seats downtown for The Economy, workers will just have to prop up the restaurants and whatever else is down there that nobody bothers going to, probably because they’ve made the downtown unlivable and unwalkable, or even undesirable to visit, in their attempts to appease business instead. So many politicians never seem to be interested in actually making society better for humans – only to do giveaways for businesses, with some stupid promise that some pittance will trickle down.
The Washington Post - Trump wants federal workers back in the office. It may be a tall task. President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for a return-to-office mandate for federal workers will face stiff resistance and union contracts that guarantee remote work. Updated December 26, 2024 D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) found common ground with congressional Republicans in pushing for a mandate that federal workers return to downtown. No mandate came, even as Biden issued several directives aimed at coaxing more federal employees back to the workplace. Managers trickled into many offices, but the administration was loath to alienate unions whose contracts had negotiated agreements allowing telework anywhere from one to five days a week. Federal employees and the unions that represent them argue that telework benefits the government by making hiring and employee benefits more competitive with private companies. They say working from home improves productivity. But conservatives and other critics of telework point to vast unused government office space that taxpayers are subsidizing and claims that performance has declined in many customer-facing agencies.
The result is chronic staffing shortages, difficulty in hiring, miserable work environments, some lucky employees who’ve stayed healthy being overburdened picking up the slack, and disability discrimination in the form of forcing people into early retirement needlessly. Everyone I know who works in-person because it’s the nature of the job, or works at a place that has in-person staff at an office, has faced these staffing issues way way over the pre-pandemic situations. People are constantly out sick with covid for days, come in sick with covid and are unproductive and spread it throughout the staff, and people are often out sick because of long covid, or things that are probably covid complications. And others are ordered by doctors to retire early with cardiac conditions, which we knew from the get-go was a known upped risk from covid infections. Many people retired early in the pandemic because of health problems likely to worsen, or result in death, if they have to get covid at work repeatedly. But it seems that tycoons, and even most Democratic politicians, think the answer to that is to just remove the possibility of any work being accessible.
MAGA gets UNCOVERED as Trump MELTS DOWN on Live TV MeidasTouch Jan 8, 2025 Stephen Miller on Fox News: “Donald Trump again he announced that federal workers are going to go back to the office because they work for you everyone watching us at home tonight they work for you those federal workers you pay their salaries they need to show up at an office and again Donald Trump's going to rip up those agreements that allows those workers to work from home although we all know what the federal workers are really doing is just absolutely nothing nothing” (...) Ron Filipkowski: “Stephen Miller in this particular appearance comes over as being a as deranged as Donald Trump but clearly has got the keys to the White House in his hand and is just running with the with the responsibility yeah I mean this remote work thing is is their pretext it's their excuse to fire civil servants I mean that's that's the excuse that they're gonna give yeah you know the funny thing about that is like everyone in Trump World Works remotely like none of them work in an office Trump doesn't work in office Musk doesn't have an office Stephen Miller doesn't work in an office none – Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, none of them do – they all work from home remotely so it's like criticizing government workers for doing it you know it's kind of ridiculous I mean I I work from home like I work from home 14 hours a day you know it's like I'm not goofing off but that's the pretext but look this is just the tip of the iceberg of what this guy wants to do I mean we're about to see you you're going to see in in the next month or to some crazy legislation and it's going to come directly from Steven Miller to Mike Johnson straight into committees.”
Expecting Fascism The second Trump administration is likely to begin with a series of shock events designed to overwhelm our capacity for sense-making. Dave Troy Jan 9, 2025 Russell Vought, a key architect of that plan and Trump's pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has said that he will advise the use of the military to suppress domestic unrest and will enact cuts that "traumatize" federal employees — effectively making conditions so unbearable that those who aren't fired will be strongly incentivized to resign.
So it’s not people that the politicians care about when they push for Return To Office. Essentially, you can look at any politician and know what they care about, (and perhaps who owns them), with their stance on RTO. If they are for expanding remote work wherever it makes sense (and we know now it makes sense for a lot of jobs), then maybe they could be considered to have at least some sense of morality with regards to labor and disability justice. If they don’t seem to care about safety, the spread of disease, and want butts in seats downtown at all costs, whatever reasons they give, it’s a clear indicator that the politicians are elites in the pocket of the Kochtopus and the fossil fuel industry, the Chamber of Commerce, commercial real estate, private equity, and tycoons.
And the bottom line is that it’s not just that these people are hostile to telework, the Trump administration has an explicit agenda to “traumatize” federal employees. And then who’s next?
‘Return to in-Person Work’ Directive Thin on Details - Published: January 21, 2025 By: FEDweek Staff It reads in its entirety: “Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of government 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. This memorandum shall be implemented consistent with applicable law.”