Posted on 02/01/2023 1:25:21 PM PST by Twotone
The Republican-led House of Representatives is voting Wednesday or Thursday on a bill that would bring more federal employees back to offices in Washington D.C.
The Stopping Home Office Work's Unproductive Problems Act or SHOW UP Act of 2023 "requires each executive agency to reinstate the telework policies that were in place on December 31, 2019."
Under the legislation, federal agencies cannot "implement expanded telework policies unless the Office of Personnel Management certifies that such policies will have a positive effect on the agency's mission and operational costs."
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act, the first of three pandemic stimulus bills, provided federal agencies with nearly $5 billion to expand teleworking infrastructure.
Federal employees can still telework under the legislation, but it would be at pre-pandemic levels, explained House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, the sponsor of the new legislation.
Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington, D.C., has said unoccupied federal buildings could be used for additional housing in the city.
"We need decisive action by the White House to either get most federal workers back to the office most of the time or to realign their vast property holdings for use by the local government, by nonprofits, by businesses, and by any user willing to revitalize it," Bowser said in her inaugural speech in early January.
Comer said he and Bowser are in agreement on filling unoccupied federal government buildings.
Just the News asked Bowser's office if she supports Comer's bill but we did not receive a response before press time.
(Excerpt) Read more at justthenews.com ...
Bowser is getting heat from the businesses that cater to the wonk class. Which are basically the only sources of income the city actually has.
Better yet, just let them go, and save us a bunch of bucks.
Big Corporate real estate lobbying...nothing more.
This is really the GOP House’s priority “show” voting?
The GOP think tanks have been hard at work to figure out issues that alienate voters or waste time and money—and then make them their priorities!
Imma guess there’s not as many federal workers as they think. 😏
Nice gesture. Mot a prayer it gets signed.
Better yet, just fire them all. They are worthless anyway.
I’m a federal employee and the unions in my agency have recently negotiated 100% remote indefinitely. Under Trump, staff had to report to an office 4x/week.
I think a hybrid requirement of 2-3 days a week in the office for everyone in the “laptop class” including federal employees would be ideal. Problem is—federal employees are unionized and the union is strong under Biden (weak under Trump).
I hear the mayor of DC is leaning on Biden to get the federal employees back to the office and I hope that effort is successful. I love working from home and so do my employees but something is lost when we NEVER see each other in person (4 of my staff are opting to go in to the office once a week voluntarily, and I go in once as well voluntarily to meet with them in person).
Hybrid is best.
Around 43 % of federal employees are home slackers get them back on the job.
Spas and happy hour are for after work.
Thanks for the details.
I thought they were already back in the office and didn’t even realize what was going on.
People really need to be face to face for most of the work week. I agree that for many jobs, they could accomplish their work with one or two days of working from home, especially if it’s stuff that mostly involves on-line activities. But they really need to be in the office most of the time and in contact with other human beings, and not sitting around dressing their upper bodies for a meaningless Zoom meeting.
Heck, the peons in the “service industry” have to go to work every day, why not our lords and masters too?
Couldn’t they at least come up with some sort of busy work that doesn’t actually affect our government?
There are all kinds of federal employees.
Many work on national teams—so that showing up to the local (DC or other) office is a waste of time.
In addition there are many incompetent federal middle managers who will be happy to hold endless useless meetings at the office if they have the power to do so.
“One size fits all” legislation makes no sense.
My thought on work from home vs office is that work from home runs into two potentially overlapping issues.
First is that far too many managers cannot effectively manage when they cannot watch their peons.
Second is that how pay is structured in practice needs to change, basically hourly is that the employee is paid for time present and (hopefully) working, remote work requires going to a piece work rate, and for far too many of these jobs nobody knows how much time they take to complete.
Telework saved me hours of time commuting and hours of time sitting in useless meetings/ceremonies away from my computer where I could not get any work done.
Our team metrics were all met or exceeded during the 100% telework period and I found that people were often available to work later or at off times while teleworking. In the office, everyone was pretty much out the door the minute their official work day ended. Frankly after two years of teleworking, I see very little benefit from making people show up to an office just so management can see seats filled.
I’m a manager and I’m pro-hybrid not to “see seats filled” but to make those team connections that happen casually and spontaneously when they discuss cases etc. Yes our team metrics are fine with 100% telework but its not optimal. Which is why private companies are slowly returning to at least a hybrid model. A few days at home plus a few days in the office is ideal.
My young adult children have never set foot in an office and long to. And brand new employees just don’t get the culture or get to know anyone when 100% remote.
Those are legitimate points. For us, new employees shadowed an experienced person via teams instead of in person and 95% of training was and still is done via Teams online whether you are in the office or not. It all depends on the job position and the actual employee.
As for the concept of team, that is important but personally I do not miss the endless in person birthday/retirement parties, inane team huddles and required attendance at meetings which often did not effect us or address what we were doing.
Our mandatory days in office now are largely eaten up with “busy admin type work” or numerous meetings (all scheduled for in office days) and it really is unproductive in my opinion.
I have been observing your pathetic posts for some time.
You have the ability of finding one incidence of fly shit in a pile of gold, and complaining about that!
Sucks to be you, I suppose.
I guess you’re big on the ol’ ad hominem.
But it is hard not to notice that your FR page claims you left because Jim has allowed other than knee-jerk anti-Russia posts here.
So you’ve come back just to try to insult me?!?
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