A proposal to reform the Federal Wage System (FWS) has moved into the early stages of the government’s rulemaking process, the Federal Prevailing Rate Advisory Committee (FPRAC) announced during a public meeting Thursday morning.

The proposal, if finalized, would amend the federal pay system for blue-collar government workers, more closely aligning it with the locality pay areas for the General Schedule (GS). An estimated 15,000 blue-collar feds would see their pay rates increase.

After FPRAC, a council that advises on pay for blue-collar feds, approved the proposal last December, the changes were sent to the Office of Personnel Management for review. OPM then handed off the proposal to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an arm of the Office of Management and Budget, to begin the rulemaking process.

Edward George, an American Federation of Government Employees official working at Tobyhanna Army Depot, expressed both gratitude and residual frustration around the proposal’s advancement.

“We are having a hiring problem, we do have skills gaps because of what’s going on with the way that our wages are calculated,” George said during Thursday’s FPRAC meeting. “I appreciate you taking this up once again. It’s very frustrating for our employees … It just seems like it’s [a never-ending] process. We would really like to see this fairly and equitably adjusted across the country as soon as possible.”

The proposed regulations are expected to be published to the Federal Register this October. Once published, OPM will accept comments on the regulations before making any potential revisions and finalizing the rule on FWS.

In total, FWS covers about 192,000 federal blue-collar employees working in trade, craft and laborer jobs. The federal pay system was established decades ago to try to keep federal wages aligned with “prevailing,” or market rates in localized areas.

But since fiscal 1979, many blue-collar feds have seen limits on their annual federal pay raises. And as a result, wages in 75% of FWS localities no longer align with local pay rates for similar jobs.

The idea to align the pay maps for the FWS and GS systems first came up more than 15 years ago, to try to reverse the growing disparity. FPRAC’s current proposal, though, comes from more recent calls from Congress in 2022, asking OPM to consider ways to reform the FWS locality pay map.

If implemented in its current form, FPRAC’s proposal would move about 10% of FWS employees from one wage area to another. Rearranging the FWS locality mapping would, in many cases, impact local pay rates for blue-collar feds working across the country. While about 15,000 employees would get pay increases, another 2,000 or so employees would be covered by “pay retention,” which would maintain pay rates of employees who would otherwise see a decrease to their pay.

But there is still opportunity to make adjustments to the current proposal. Once the proposed regulations are available in the Federal Register, likely later this year, stakeholders will be able to share any feedback they might have about the planned changes to FWS.

And already, there has been plenty of discussion on how to work out the details of the coming changes. When advancing the draft proposal in December 2023, most FPRAC members agreed that some type of FWS reform was necessary, but a couple members expressed disagreements over what those reforms should actually look like.

For instance, some FPRAC members raised concerns about costs and potential complications of implementing FWS map changes. Some members also said they were worried about agencies having to work within their current budgets to implement the pay adjustments, rather than receiving additional funding for them. One suggested alternative was to consider pay changes on a regional basis, rather than amending the entire pay system.

During Thursday’s FPRAC meeting, many attendees also indicated plans to write public comments on the proposed regulations coming this fall.

The public comments, AFGE’s George said, will be “more than they’ve ever seen.”

The post Blue-collar federal pay reform heading toward rulemaking process first appeared on Federal News Network.

Dave Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, which represents some FAA employees, said the agency is also short on technicians, which can result in longer equipment outages and more flight delays.

“Having fewer technicians than needed can result in inadequate shift coverage. This means we do not have the right person available to resolve a crisis when it occurs,” Spero told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s aviation subcommittee at a hearing Wednesday.

Spero said it can take a newly hired FAA technician years to fully complete their training.

The FAA is also dealing with a shortage of 3,000 air traffic controllers. Subcommittee Chairman Sam Graves (R-Mo.) said the FAA’s staffing issues are becoming more apparent with attrition outpacing hiring.

“You’re seeing great disparity with retirements in air traffic controllers and the hiring — meaning that they’re not keeping pace with the hiring pipeline with those that are retiring,” Graves said.

The Transportation Security Administration says a record 3 million people flew the Sunday after the Fourth of July, and that eight of the 10 busiest days for air travel took place after May 24.

“You look at the stresses today, you look at the industry today. In the future, this is just going to grow greater and greater,” Graves said.

Spero said the FAA analysis shows lower staffing of FAA technicians translates into more longer and more frequent maintenance issues.

A radar system problem in Chicago earlier this summer temporarily led to a ground stop of flights.

Spero said there was no technician on site with the skills needed fix the issue quickly, and that an off-duty technician had to be called in to fix the issue.

“Air traffic controllers were seeing multiple targets on their displays. The only solution at that particular point was to put a ground stop in place because they did not know where the aircraft were,” Spero said.  “That problem would have been resolved if they had the right number of people with the right amount of training. And that was a conscious decision made by the agency there in Chicago to say, we don’t need anyone on staff that has that training right now.”

Spero said the FAA is also using an “insufficient” staffing model for its aviation safety inspector workforce.

FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker recently told the Senate Commerce Committee that more inspectors are being sent to oversee Boeing and its suppliers, following the fatal crashes of two 737 MAX jets in 2018 and 2019 that killed more than 340 people.

Spero said PASS recognized the need for greater oversight of Boeing, but said this oversight work is spreading the rest of the FAA inspection workforce thin.

“We do not know where the agency is transferring these inspectors from and if the oversight of other manufacturers or airlines will be impacted,” Spero said. Simply moving inspectors from other manufacturing environments is not a solution.”

The FAA has been developing a technical operations staffing model for over a decade. Spero is urging the agency to focus on the retention of current employees and to provide them with opportunities for career growth.

“We lose people and we’re not able to replace them. And we don’t have that pipeline coming in. We’re not prepared to replace someone when they leave,” Spero said.

Ranking Member Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said the number of certified professional controllers has declined for more than a decade, and that most facilities across the country have a shortage of air traffic controllers.

The FAA, he added, is “slowly recovering” from a temporary suspension of training at its academy at the height of the pandemic.

“Historical staffing challenges facing air traffic organization technicians, such as increased workload without additional resources and training, exacerbate these ongoing workforce bottlenecks,” Cohen said.

The post FAA short-staffed on air traffic controllers, technicians during peak travel season, union warns first appeared on Federal News Network.

A recent pay increase at the Transportation Security Administration has cut the agency’s attrition rate in half. But beyond staving off attrition, TSA leaders are also looking to build retention and solve some of the agency’s historic workforce challenges.

Employee engagement and satisfaction at TSA, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, improved by a significant margin in just the last year. Between 2022 and 2023, TSA increased its overall score by 12.3 points in the results of the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings. Moving from a score of 45.2 to 57.5 out of 100 is the highest year-over-year increase TSA has had since the Partnership’s rankings began 2005.

Jason Nelson, chief human capital officer at TSA, credited the improvements in large part to the pay increase TSA employees first received in 2023.

“We were really starting to compete with fast food places, warehouses or big box stores, when really, this is more of a career,” Nelson said in an interview with Federal News Network. “A lot of our staff would walk across the hall go to another agency, because we couldn’t pay as well.”

Of TSA’s 60,000 employees, roughly 42,000 are transportation security officers (TSOs) working at nearly 440 airports nationwide and screening more than 2 million passengers daily. The other about 25% of TSA employees work in back-office functions. With the pay raise that began last year, some TSOs saw as much as a 31% pay boost.

“It’s life-changing,” Nelson said. “People are saying they got the surgery they’ve been putting off, or they moved out of their parents’ house for the first time … It’s just so amazing to get out there and see the faces of the people and the tears of joy. When you see these things on paper, it’s very different.”

The effects of the pay increases shone through in the Partnership’s Best Places to Work results as well. Pay satisfaction scores for TSA employees have more than doubled since 2022.

Before the pay boost, the TSA workforce was paid noticeably lower than many federal employees at comparable levels on the General Schedule (GS). The disparity led to high staff attrition rates at TSA.

But since the raise took effect, and was continued through 2024, TSA has reported more interest in job openings, as well as a 9% drop in staff attrition rates, decreasing from 20% to now roughly 11%. In other words, TSA retained about 88% of its frontline employees — the highest annual retention rate in the agency’s history. TSA also hired over 9,000 new TSOs and security support assistants during 2023, the agency said.

“It’s unbelievable. I mean, to go down and cut your losses by half is really something else,” Nelson said. “Everyone is excited — I’m excited. But as a human capital officer, I also have to be realistic.”

Creating career ladders for TSOs

Nelson described the drop in staff attrition as a “honeymoon phase” — and he’s already wary of how long the high retention rates can be maintained without digging into further workforce challenges at the agency. Compared against other agency subcomponents across government, TSA is still in the bottom quartile of the Partnership’s rankings.

As one way to try to further improve staff retention, TSA is creating “career ladders,” or more defined steps for getting promoted and moving up in the agency. Nelson said he had regularly heard concerns about the lack of career development opportunities from employees who filled out the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) or took other opportunities to offer feedback.

“We’ve heard from the staff very, very clearly that in order to make it a career, it’s about more than just base pay. It’s about advancement,” Nelson said. “It took many, many years of planning, and of course budgeting, but it all came from the feedback from our employees.”

TSA now uses a “pay band” system, which in practice means new TSA employees can come in as a GS-5 equivalent, but can then move up to a GS-7, and eventually a GS-9, within their first three years on the job. The new career ladder system, now about one year in, lets employees move up those steps based on their own performance, rather than having to compete with their colleagues for higher positions.

Nelson said the better predictability of TSO salaries over the first couple of years at the agency, as well as being able to see the pay band system that’s now in place, should lead to better staff retention.

“Now people are saying, ‘I might make a little bit less than another job I’m being offered, but in two years, I’ll be up 50% or 60%. I’m not going to get that with competitors outside of the government,’” Nelson said. “Especially because we hire people in high school, people coming out of the military [and] a lot of people coming out of restaurants and the fast food industry looking for a career, it’s really exciting to show that stability in their life.”

Moving forward, Nelson said he’s also trying to figure out how to incorporate career development and advancement opportunities by creating formalized career paths in TSA, clearer ways for TSOs to get promoted to leads, and then supervisors — and possibly offering career paths for TSA employees to convert to positions elsewhere in DHS.

“We want our leaders to be critical thinkers. We want them to have empathy. We want them to be problem solvers,” Nelson said. “We want to make sure that the people that move up have some of those skills or the potential to learn them, as opposed to just being around the longest.”

Expanded collective bargaining for TSA staff

Many of TSA’s recent workforce improvements have also come as a result of a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the American Federation of Government Employees. The contract, signed in May, is TSA’s first-ever full-fledged CBA. The agreement expands collective bargaining rights through a streamlined grievance process, increased official time, eased restrictions on sick leave, opportunities for local collective bargaining — and much more.

“It’s only going to help morale, especially when management and the union are so in lockstep with the issues and with the things that we want to do, and the successes that we made,” Nelson said.

Even seemingly small changes can make a big difference for employees. Polo shirts, as an example, are now allowed as part of TSOs’ uniform options. Under the new CBA, employees working in warmer climates can wear polo shirts throughout the year to try to get relief on especially hot days.

“That was such a big deal for so many people because that’s their life every day, 40 hours a week or more,” Nelson said. “You’d think that’s not something that would be on a lot of people’s minds, but it was on the employees’ minds.”

Nelson said he also travels to various locations across the country to talk to TSOs in person and try to make the message clear that the agency is listening and trying to make changes based on their direct feedback.

“A lot of times, our frontline workforce [are] on their feet, they’re in the airports, they’re inspecting surface areas, they’re moving around the country, or they’re law enforcement, flying an aircraft or driving vehicles,” Nelson said. “It’s rare that they can get on email, so we try to do this stuff more in person.

What’s next for TSA’s workforce

Beyond the pay increases and new career ladders, Nelson said TSA’s requirement of creating location-specific action plans based on FEVS results will help make even more improvements for the workforce down the line.

Although there is some overlap in what issues TSOs are facing across the country, Nelson said it’s also dependent on the airport and the city where employees are working.

“We do have some locations where you would see some equity and inclusion issues, and other places that we would see work-life balance issues,” Nelson said. “We look at the grand scale, of course, but those action plans by location are critical.”

For instance, Nelson said one crucial issue among more remote locations across the country — like Nome, Alaska; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Key West, Florida; or the Northwestern Islands of Hawaii — is the availability of housing near airports.

“There’s no place to live,” Nelson said. “Even if we pay people double, they just can’t get the housing.”

After receiving the action plans and visiting some of the more remote locations to speak with TSOs in those areas, Nelson said he’s now working with DHS and the Defense Department to try to offer alternative and more affordable housing options for staff.

And in conversations with TSOs, Nelson said he now uses the example of the recent pay increase to show how much of a difference employee input can make.

“We remind our staff that it’s because they talked about it, it’s because they raised it,” Nelson said. “It came up in the survey year over year, and we used those results on the congressional floor and in testimony to show how critical it is for our retention.”

The post TSA looking beyond ‘honeymoon phase’ for frontline workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.

The 2025 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill, which the GOP-led subcommittee advanced this week, includes language specifically targeting teleworking federal employees.

Report language accompanying the bill, which staff members for Subcommittee Chairman Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) shared with Federal News Network, would set new requirements for agencies to publicly report their policies on federal telework and office space.

“Federal employees are consistently abusing work-from-home policies within their respective agencies,” Aderholt wrote in a statement to Federal News Network. “Federal agencies that provide direct service to the public must return to work to better serve the American people. Telework should be judged solely on a case-by-case basis, not blanket policies.”

If enacted, the bill would require agencies to publicly share their office space utilization rates in the D.C. area, as well as the methodology they used to calculate those rates. Agencies would have 90 days to get the information online — and would have to update the data quarterly.

Office space utilization has remained a major challenge for agencies for years. The Government Accountability Office has said agencies currently have a unique opportunity to right-size their office holdings, now in a hybrid work environment.

Still, the lawmakers said they remain concerned with what they said is a lack of federal employees reporting to work in-person.

“A lack of in-office presence is particularly problematic for agencies whose mission involves direct service to the public,” subcommittee leaders wrote in the bill’s report.

The subcommittee’s report language also zeroes in on requirements for the specific agencies the legislation covers, including the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Education Department. The lawmakers are eyeing a 60-day deadline for those agencies to report how many employees are receiving D.C. locality pay, but who have not worked in-person in a D.C. office more than one day per week in the past year.

“Excessive abuse of telework across the federal government must end,” the subcommittee wrote. “Approvals for remote work should be made on an individual case-by-case basis and done only to serve the best interests of the program and the American public. The committee urges the secretary to bring federal employees back to the workplace to fulfill the mission of serving the American public.”

The bill would also reduce administrative funding, “considering the remote work abuse seen at several agencies,” the subcommittee wrote.

Federal unions such as the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union have repeatedly pushed back on the calls to return federal employees to the office full-time. Union leaders have said federal telework options and other workplace flexibilities are crucial for recruiting and retaining the future federal workforce.

“We maintain a simple position — that telework and remote work policies should be tailored to the specific needs of the agency and the nature of the work, rather than pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach for the whole of government through legislation,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley wrote in a statement to Federal News Network.

NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald called for the appropriations committee to work on funding agencies, rather than targeting telework policies for the federal workforce.

“The more telework an agency is able to grant, the less office space taxpayers need to pay for, as proven by some agencies who have already started to downsize and save money,” Greenwald wrote in a statement. “It is time to accept the data that telework works and focus on funding the government, so it has the resources to properly deliver for the American people.”

AFGE pointed to a recent study from the Congressional Budget Office that found federal employees, on average, are working remotely less often than private sector employees. Regarding office space utilization, AFGE said it has no objections to the idea of agencies letting go of physical space they don’t need.

“We should be clear about the facts,” Kelley wrote. “As [the Office of Personnel Management] has stated to Congress in a recent hearing, 54% of the federal workforce never worked remotely a single day — including during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The nature of their work does not allow it. These are people like nurses, correctional officers, border patrol agents, transportation security officers and many others.”

“The fact is that hundreds of thousands of employees who have public-facing duties, like screening cargo and protecting the ports, maintaining the National Parks or meeting with taxpayers to deliver government services report to the workplace every day,” Greenwald added. “Those who are telework-eligible perform the same duties at their telework location as they would while in a traditional workplace. Telework has been around for decades and is subject to strict oversight and management approval.”

The committee’s report language, though, isn’t the only instance of House appropriators targeting federal telework and calling for a large-scale return to the office. In the House’s 2025 defense appropriations bill, for instance, lawmakers included a provision that would, if enacted, severely restrict federal telework and remote work options for civilian DoD employees.

The provision would effectively ban telework for the DoD civilian workforce by prohibiting any government funds from going toward “the costs of teleworking or remote working” for “any employee or contractor of the Department of Defense on a regular and recurring basis,” the House committee wrote in report language last week.

The return-to-office push began in part with an April 2023 Office of Management and Budget memo, which told agencies to bring telework-eligible employees into the office for at least 50% of their work hours.

The Biden administration has said a majority of agencies have, by now, completed the required return-to-office changes. OMB Deputy Director for Management Jason Miller told the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in April that agencies would be held accountable for fully implementing the 50% in-the-office presence.

Still, Aderholt and other appropriations committee members are pushing for an even larger in-office presence of the federal workforce.

“I urge the secretaries of these agencies to bring federal employees back to the workplace immediately so that the American people can be served in a way they deserve,” Aderholt wrote. “Simply put, it’s time to get back to work.”

The post More House appropriators target federal telework, office space first appeared on Federal News Network.

Employees at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), many of whom are currently working in the office one day per week, are about to see changes in their work environment.

When hammering out return-to-office plans, like many other federal agencies, FDIC had initially planned to require employees to report to the office three days per week beginning later this summer. But late last week, FDIC instead pivoted and announced that employees will have to come into the office just two days per week starting on July 15, FDIC confirmed to Federal News Network. Once implemented, the new telework arrangements will remain in effect until further notice.

Although the in-office requirements are lower than initially expected, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents FDIC employees, is pushing the agency’s leadership to return to the drawing board. Vivian Hwa, president of NTEU Chapter 207, is calling for the agency to continue working to resolve the already monthslong bargaining dispute over telework, rather than move forward with the announced changes.

Months prior to making its return-to-office announcement, FDIC had opened negotiations over the telework provision included in its collective bargaining agreement with NTEU. During those negotiations, FDIC proposed its initial three-days-per-week policy.

“We were in the middle of negotiations, we were in front of an impasse panel trying to come up with a new agreement — and then they yanked their proposal,” Hwa, whose NTEU chapter represents employees at FDIC headquarters, said in an interview with Federal News Network.

But after a long stretch of time and no signs of approaching an agreement, NTEU got in touch with the Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP) earlier this year asking for assistance. FSIP, an independent entity within the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), helps agencies and unions resolve disputes that arise during labor-management negotiations.

FSIP had agreed to work with both NTEU and FDIC to help the two parties reach an agreement ahead of the July 15 deadline, Hwa said. But FDIC then withdrew its proposal to change the telework provision in the collective bargaining agreement. NTEU called FDIC’s announcement of the two-day in-office requirement a “unilateral decision” that involved bad faith negotiating.

“This step shows a lack of respect for the statutory process and FDIC employees,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement. “Ignoring the bargaining process and illegally imposing new telework requirements will make that a much more difficult process … NTEU has asked the FSIP to retain jurisdiction over this bargaining dispute and will fight to ensure the agency follows the law and completes the bargaining process.”

FDIC declined to comment on the reason behind its decision to make a return-to-office announcement and rescind its previous proposal.

According to FDIC’s new telework policy announcement obtained by Federal News Network, FDIC divisions and offices will individually designate one of the two in-office days each week. Employees will coordinate with their supervisors to schedule the second in-office day. Supervisors will also still be able to schedule in-office work during “core hours,” which run from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. local time. Outside of those core hours, employees have flexibility to work from home part of the day, if needed.

The updated in-office requirements apply to most teleworking employees, but don’t apply to any staff working at field offices, along with a handful of other exempt groups.

After the changes take place in July, FDIC plans to monitor effects on the workplace culture as well employee engagement, morale and productivity.

But Hwa said the lack of clarity over some details of FDIC’s telework decision is only leading to more confusion for the workforce.

“All we can do is read the emails and what they’re telling us, but at the same time, we’re like, ‘What is this? What are you saying?'” Hwa said. “On top of that, they’re no longer negotiating, which was confusing to everybody because we all thought that [was] the purpose of the July deadline.”

The debate over FDIC’s telework posture also comes as the agency faces low morale and recruitment challenges as a result of recent reports describing a toxic workplace environment. An independent report published earlier this year details cases of stalking, harassment, homophobia and other violations of employment regulations based on more than 500 employee complaints.

Given the recent workforce challenges stemming from the reports, Hwa said she is especially worried about the return-to-office changes.

“People just don’t feel safe to return to the office,” Hwa said. “They haven’t had anything in place yet that really lets us feel safe.”

FDIC also ranked 25 out of 26 midsize agencies in the 2023 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings from the Partnership for Public Service.

“The FDIC has much work to do in regaining the trust of its workforce,” NTEU’s Greenwald said.

NTEU is now calling on FDIC leadership to return to the initial dispute resolution process and move forward with FSIP’s services.

“A lot of employees made significant life decisions based on their ability to telework, and assurances from FDIC that they were going to negotiate these things [with NTEU] and come to an agreement on something that is reasonable and acceptable to the employees,” Hwa said. “But they didn’t do that. This telework change is going to increase retirements and employee departures at a time when FDIC really can’t recruit and retain everybody that they need.”

Hwa said whatever the telework policy is moving forward, it should reflect the work that employees are actually doing.

“If you need us to come in for a particular work product, that is fine with us, we do not mind. But to say you need to come in so that you can sit in your office and do the same Microsoft Teams calls to everybody else who’s also calling, it just doesn’t seem to make sense,” Hwa said. “The point is, let’s talk about this and come up with something that works best for us.”

The post Union calls for FDIC to ‘follow the law’ after pivot on return-to-office plans first appeared on Federal News Network.

Nurses at the Department of Veterans Affairs are calling on leadership to hire more frontline health care workers, and protesting nationwide staffing shortages that they say make it harder to treat veterans.

VA nurses represented by National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) and National Nurses United (NNU) rallied outside the VA’s headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

NNOC/NNU are calling on the VA to lift “what is, in effect, a hiring freeze,” that has led to 66,000 vacancies across the VA health care system. More than 13,000 of those vacancies are nursing positions.

The Veterans Health Administration hired 61,000 employees last year, its fastest rate of growth in 15 years, and saw its total workforce peak at more than 400,000 employees — its highest-ever headcount.

But the VA has scaled back its health care hiring goals this year, and is planning to cut its workforce by 10,000 positions, under its fiscal 2025 budget proposal. Most of the job cuts would come from VHA.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough told reporters the department expects to manage this reduction through attrition.

VA leaders have repeatedly said VHA isn’t going through a hiring freeze, and that it continues to hire for frontline medical positions — just at a less aggressive pace than it did last year. because of higher employee retention rates.

NNU Vice President and Veterans Affairs Chairwoman Irma Westmoreland, a registered nurse at the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia, said VA nurses are spread thin by unfilled positions, leading to burnout and “moral distress.”

“We feel the lack of these nurses in our faculties every day — every single day,” Westmoreland said in an interview. “We feel that we are chronically understaffed in nursing, and that is erodes the patient care that we’re able to provide for our veterans. And this hiring freeze cuts services to veterans.”

VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said in a statement that “there is no nationwide hiring freeze on VA nurses,” and that over the past three years, the VA increased its nursing workforce by 14,000 positions.

Hayes said the VA currently employs 122,000 total nurses — the largest nursing workforce in the country and in the history of VA. VA’s nursing workforce, he added, has a turnover rate of 3.4%, and is “far outperforming” the private sector.

The VA, he said, has increased staffing by more than 3% so far in fiscal 2024.

“There is no shortage of VA staff. After a record year of hiring in 2023, VA currently has the largest health care workforce in our history — and we are retaining those great employees at all-time record rates,” Hayes said.

Jordan Le Blanc, an ICU nurse at the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado, said VA’s “gold standard” for care is to have an ICU nurse assigned to care for one or two critically ill patients.

Since December 2020, however, Le Blanc said ICU nurses in his facility have been following a “crisis nursing” staffing model, and are assigned three patients.

“It has already diminished the quantity of the services that we can provide, and it really at the individual level of each interaction that I have with veterans,” LeBlanc said, speaking in his capacity as an NNU member. “It poses a risk that diminishes the VA mission and the way that we should be honoring these individuals for the service that they provided to our country.”

Le Blanc said his VA medical center will, at times, assign nurses to cover the ICU, but who don’t have ICU specialty training.

“They do not know how to manage mechanical ventilators or medications that augment blood pressure that are infused continuously. And so, that ultimately means that the quality of care — really the dignity of care, at the simplest level — is impacted in a negative way,” he said.

A VA inspector general report in August 2023 found 93% of VA medical facilities reported a severe staffing shortage of practical nurses.

McDonough told reporters in April that VA’s nurse-to-patient ratios are not “perfect in every facility,” but said nurses are generally spread thinner in private health care facilities.

“The stress that comes with an individual nurse covering multiple beds in an ICU, for example, in a community, is not matched to the VA system, where our patient ratios suggest that it’s a much different experience,” McDonough said.

Chief Financial Officer Jon Rychalski told reporters in March that the MISSION Act, COVID-19 pandemic and the toxic-exposure PACT Act have all led to record growth in community care year-over-year.

“They’ve put us on a path where we cannot sustain the rapid growth and community care in addition to the fixed costs that support our massive direct care system,” Rychalski said.

Westmoreland said that if VA continues to see rising community care costs, “it threatens to erode the VA’s direct care system, which could lead to elimination of services and leave veterans without the option of care.”

“The VA is a place where veterans heal together in their community, they find camaraderie with others and in specialized experience and, and they miss that when they’re not in the VA,” she said.

“We’re now looking at what is it that we need to do, what services can we cut? Where can we look to see what we need to do, to make to make sure we have enough money to pay that bill, instead of going back and saying we need money to care for our patients,” she added.

Le Blanc said the Rocky Mountain Regional VAMC recently decreased the capacity of its ICU from 18 beds to 12 beds, and that its spinal cord unit shrank from 28-bed unit down to 15 beds.

“They definitely have been open with us that there are budgetary deficits, both within our facility and within VA nationally. A large component of that is in relation to community care,” he said.

Following interdisciplinary meetings between frontline staff and facility leaders, the chief nurse and facility director for the Rocky Mountain Regional VAMC  determined last December that the facility needed 57 additional nurses this year. However, Le Blanc says the VAMC never filled those positions.

“They approved those positions in December, and then no positions were ever posted or have been hired for,” he said.

Le Blanc said current funding levels at the Rocky Mountain Regional VAMC only supports about 85% of filled ICU beds, and that current staffing levels can’t accommodate that level of care.

“We have not enough employees to meet 85% of filled ICU beds at the medical standard of patient ratios, in terms of nurses,” he said.

Le Blanc said the VAMC’s interim director, in an April meeting, likened the VA’s budget problems to balancing a checkbook.

“When you’ve got to balance a personal checkbook, you don’t always bet what you want, ” he said in summary of the discussion. “But the reality is,  the care of our veterans and safe staffing, and this right to excellent health care, it isn’t a joking matter … We trust these leaders to make responsible decisions, and to set up sustainable practices. And that’s really what we need here.”

VHA in recent memos, put a temporary pause on medical facilities retracting tentative and final job offers to candidates, then told leadership and HR officials to only rescind job offers as an “action of last resort.”

VA says they’re not in a hiring freeze, but we see the job offers being rescinded, and vacancies that were scheduled to be filled are not even being filled,” Westmoreland said.

LeBlanc said the Rocky Mountain VAMC gave tentative job offers to two candidates, but “it’s basically stopped there.”

“They’re awaiting what we would call their formal job offer, with their entry on duty,” he said.

Westmoreland said VA health care job applicants are frustrated by delays and rescinded job offers.

“If somebody waited to get into the VA, did all the things they had to do and waited, and had a tentative job offer, and then all those job offers were rescinded, because we’re freezing. Do you know what those people did? They said, ‘Forget the VA, I’m going to go work somewhere else.‘ And now we got to start over if you want to hire, recruit them. And so now our time to hire is going to be even longer,” she said.

Westmoreland said VHA’s average time to fill in some facilities is as high at 168 days. VHA, she added, is trying to get that down to 120 days, but warned that’s still to long for qualified candidates to wait.

“That’s still three months …. in the private sector, people can go to a private sector hospital interview for a job and be working in two weeks,” she said.

The post VA touts its largest nursing workforce, but union says they’re ‘chronically understaffed’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

Leaders at the Defense Logistics Agency say they are still assessing the effects of an aggressive return-to-office policy that’s led to widespread employee dissatisfaction and two formal allegations of unfair labor practices, but that so far, the policy does not appear to have had a serious negative impact on recruiting and retention.

DLA’s new policy is one of the most prescriptive in the federal government, but officials say it’s necessary as part of a broader effort to “transform” the agency for great power competition. The changes took effect in January, requiring all employees to be in the office at least three days each week.

The three-day in-office minimum isn’t unheard of among federal agencies. What’s unusual is that individual supervisors and employees have no say over which days those are. All 18,000 of the agency’s telework-eligible staff are required to report to their offices on the exact same days: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of each week. The across-the-board rule is significantly more restrictive and burdensome than even the polices that were in place before COVID, several DLA employees and union leaders told Federal News Network.

“I know for many, it’s not the most popular change that we’ve made over the past several years,” Brad Bunn, DLA’s vice director told a worldwide town hall presentation last month. “But given the requirements that we’re facing, and the urgency and speed at which we need to make these changes, the agency made that shift and standardized when folks are together. We already are challenged with a very geographically dispersed workforce and how our headquarters elements are dispersed throughout the agency. We wanted to have a process where we could bring folks back and have the environment where we could bring changes and use that collaboration and integration to drive solutions.”

DLA is an outlier, employees say

As part of a return-to-office survey Federal News Network conducted in April, which garnered thousands of responses from federal employees, responses from DLA staff stood out: Employees told us the rigidity of the policy has created unusual financial and logistical difficulties for employeess and made the agency overall a less attractive place to work.

“The strict DLA telework policy does not take into consideration any workplace or position-specific elements, including but not limited to: position description, if the employee is customer facing or not, where the employee’s colleagues or customers are located … and a supervisor’s ability to supervise their own employee rather than enforcing a one size fits all policy,” one survey respondent said. “Both my spouse and I work for DLA, therefore the RTO mandate negatively impacts our work-life balance and has created a family hardship.”

“DLA has mandated we are in the office six days a pay period. On the same installation, DFAS only has to be in the office four days a period, how would that make you feel?” asked another. Another added that “DLA is losing its most talented people in mass quantities. The people who remain have unmanageable workloads.”

Several also told us that they’re finding themselves less productive when they’re in the office than when they’re working remotely, and that challenges with insufficient parking, IT outages, and finding lunch options now that many cafeterias have closed or are overcrowded in the middle of the week are all common problems.

“I spend 50% of my day on teleconferences with customers not located in my office. The rest I spend writing contracts, emails to customers, statements of work, negotiation memorandums, and enjoy not having the distractions of the office,” another respondent wrote. “I need quiet to concentrate and write formal documents. An open-air office does not offer this environment.”

Collective problems require ‘presence,’ leaders say

Lt. Gen. Mark Simerly, who took over as the agency’s director in February, acknowledged there may be some truth to the productivity arguments — on an individual basis. But right now, he said, DLA is hyper-focused on problems that cross organizational and functional boundaries, making in-person collaboration essential.

“We are improving our ability to tackle and solve collective problems by physical presence in the workplace,” he told attendees at the town hall. “Part of the purpose is team building and innovation that is just very difficult to conjure in a virtual setting. I just know from my own personal experience that I run my best wind sprints when I’m with a group. And I think we can achieve our best results when we can encourage each other — we can problem solve, we can innovate when we are standing shoulder-to-shoulder. In many cases, we can be individually more productive [in remote settings]. But I don’t know if we can be as productive as a team when we operate in isolation and separately.”

DLA officials said they’re open to making changes to the new telework policy, and that they’re carefully watching workforce data and gathering employee feedback. So far, Bunn said, there aren’t any metrics that show clear declines in hiring or retention: The number of people applying for DLA positions is down about 5% compared to last year, but retention is up over the same period.

“My initial assessment is I think it’s having the intended effect,” he said “I’m seeing more collaboration happening in real time. I’m seeing shorter lead times to solutions. We’re starting to see that traction, but nothing is set in stone. We will continue to assess our whole [telework] posture over the next year or so, and then we will work with our our policy experts and employee representatives to determine what the best approach is going forward into the future.”

However, union representatives and multiple employees alleged DLA has declined to share specific statistics on hiring and retention since the implementation of the new, much more rigid telework policy. Anecdotally, several survey respondents told us it’s clear that hiring has slowed and that people are leaving at a faster clip than they otherwise would.

“If DLA returned to the telework policy that was in place prior to COVID, I think most people would be fine,” one said. “DLA used to be the agency to work for. Now we are all overworked and under appreciated due to everyone jumping ship,” wrote another.

DLA’s transformation objectives

As far as the big, transformational, organizational changes DLA is trying to achieve, Simerly said they’re largely about putting the agency on a combat footing, and getting DLA to think about how to operate in an era of great power competition, in much the way the military services are.

“When we think about logistics and the way it’s delivered from port to fort, or from factory to foxhole, it’s significantly different than it ever has been. We call that contested logistics,” he said. “We need to understand that logistics is vulnerable; that’s why our enemies will target our logistics capabilities … if anything can be seen on the future battlefield, it will be targeted, and if it can be targeted, it will be destroyed. Those are some of the challenges and changes that have taken place across the world that we have to respond to.”

As one example of near-term changes Simerly wants to make to help prepare for that contested logistics future: DLA personnel need to be regularly participating in the exercises the military services are already conducting to prepare for possible conflict with China.

“As they learn about operating in a contested logistics environment, we have to be shoulder-to-shoulder with them, learning those lessons at the same time and incorporating them back here. We can’t wait for it to come out in the lessons learned compendium one or two years later,” he said. “We have traditionally had people that we’ve been committing to those things over the years. In some cases, we send those people to those things to observe. That’s got to change, we have to send people to participate. And that might mean we have to send different people with different skill sets in order to gain the insights that we need.”

Bunn said at the same time, DLA is making big changes to the business side of its operations that, he argues, also require more physical presence.

For example: the implementation of a new warehouse management system, and changing business processes to hopefully pass a financial audit by 2028.

“The audit is a high-risk proposition, given how many notices of findings and recommendations we have,” he said. “And every one of those corrective action plans is trying to address a pretty gnarly challenge: digital business transformation. That’s recapitalizing our IT infrastructure, our business systems that we’ve relied on for many decades. We are making a ton of changes in a short, compressed period of time, and it requires us to rethink how we do business. That’s not just a [CIO] thing — it’s the business and technology enablers coming together across multiple functions to make those things happen.”

Employees say DLA still hasn’t explained ‘why’

However, many employees told us that agency leaders have not clearly articulated why a future of contested logistics and business transformation requires tens of thousands of employees — across dozens of global locations — to be in their respective offices on the exact same days.

And DLA’s largest union, the American Federation of Government Employees, has filed two separate complaints alleging unfair labor practices with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, arguing that the new policy also violates the agency’s contract with AFGE.

Parts of the contract were imposed by a federal impasse board during previous disputes under the Trump Administration. The contract stipulates that employees need to be in the office for 60% of their work hours, but says nothing about which specific days of the week those hours must be.

And throughout 2023, DLA had been operating under a “pilot program,” in agreement with AFGE, that allowed much more telework flexibility. According to the union, the agency abruptly terminated that informal agreement last September and notified AFGE that it would insist on the three-day per week requirement, and interpret the contract in such a way that the agency could choose the days of the week that would add up to 60% in-office.

AFGE’s complaints to the FLRA allege that the agency refused to bargain with the union over the new arrangement, and violated other portions of the contract, including some that were imposed by the prior impasse panel over the union’s objection.

Regardless of what the FLRA decides about the new policy’s legality, there are implications to the inflexible telework policy that are turning out to make it work even worse in practice than how it looks on paper, said Terry Day, the president of AFGE Council 169, which represents the union’s DLA’s employees.

For instance: if Mondays and Fridays are the only permissible telework days across an agency of thousands of workers in many different locations and work functions, it’s guaranteed that the most junior members of the workforce are going to get the short end of the stick — since it’s almost impossible for any individual worksite to have all of its employees teleworking on any one day.

For those younger employees, Day argued, the new policy is effectively a telework prohibition.

“The people with the most tenure, 20-30 years, are going to take up the Mondays and Fridays. It’s a severe disadvantage for the people who have just gotten out of college and are just starting — that’s what they’ve taken away from these employees,” he said. “A lot of those younger people are going to go to jobs where they can telework five days a week. You’re not going to keep people around if they can go to a contractor where they make more money and get better benefits.”

The post Upset at DLA over unusually restrictive telework policy first appeared on Federal News Network.

After negotiating for more than two years, the Environmental Protection Agency has finally ironed out a new collective bargaining agreement with its union, the American Federation of Government Employees.

AFGE Council 238, which represents over 8,000 EPA employees, unanimously ratified the new contract on May 16. The agreement is now in a final review process with agency leaders. By late June, the changes in the contract will become official for the next four years, replacing an interim labor-management agreement.

The contract locks in a couple new articles for bargaining unit employees, one related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA), and another on scientific integrity. Although the contract is a positive milestone for the labor-management relationship, AFGE said it’s still wary of what the future holds for the agency’s telework policy.

For the time being, the new collective bargaining agreement secures EPA’s current policies on remote work, telework and flexible work schedules. It was one of the earliest articles AFGE and EPA negotiated for the contract. Currently, telework-eligible bargaining unit employees have to work in the office two days per pay period at a minimum.

But Marie Owens Powell, president of AFGE Council 238, said AFGE is already thinking ahead to the possibility of a “mid-term reopening” of the contract in two years. At that time, agency and union officials will have the opportunity to renegotiate some of the agreement’s provisions.

“The agency has made it clear they intend to open remote work and telework, so the fight is far from over,” Powell said in an interview. “We continue to remain open to discussing with the agency the successes of remote work and telework, but what we’re not willing to do is enter into negotiations right now that are not required. That seems to be what the agency would like to do, [but] the midterm negotiations are not required for two years. We will wait until then.”

An EPA spokesperson said the agency is exploring potential changes to its telework and remote policies to achieve the administration’s current goal to increase meaningful in-person work, while still abiding by all collective bargaining agreements.

In the meantime, Powell said AFGE will focus on firming up its position on telework at EPA, and figuring out how it plans to defend the current, relatively flexible policies in place at the agency.

Overall, both EPA and AFGE view the new collective bargaining agreement largely as a success — especially after many long, tense months of negotiations, and after running into several sticking points. The new agreement, among many standard collective bargaining provisions, adds a handful of new articles for the agency.

EPA Press Secretary Remmington Belford said EPA is “pleased” about arriving at the new collective bargaining agreement, particularly for the articles relating to scientific integrity and DEIA.

“These articles clarify EPA’s commitment to a culture of scientific integrity and affirm the importance of integrating DEIA principles across the agency,” Belford said in an email statement.

EPA to launch DEIA pilot to assess hiring practices

Adding a DEIA article to the union contract is new for EPA, and relatively unique for a federal collective bargaining agreement. AFGE’s initial proposal in June 2022 to add the article led to many back-and-forth discussions between agency and union officials. AFGE proposed multiple DEIA initiatives, like installing gender-neutral bathrooms, implementing DEIA training for EPA employees, diversifying hiring panels and much more.

During negotiations, after being unable to initially reach an agreement, EPA and AFGE considered moving a handful of articles to an impasse, including the provision on DEIA. In August 2023, in reaction to the possibility of an impasse, House lawmakers called on both EPA and AFGE to negotiate in good faith, specifically on the DEIA article.

Ultimately, EPA and AFGE used a third-party mediator to reach an agreement on the provision. The final contract article includes DEIA training for employees, as well as plans to launch several pilot projects to assess the presence of implicit bias in the agency’s hiring and promotion processes.

“We’re really excited that we actually have action items, and we’re excited just to have this article for the first time,” Powell said. “The agency is committing to equal and fair treatment of all employees, and no tolerance for any harassment.”

Even seemingly small items in the DEIA contract article, like installing gender-neutral bathrooms, can make a significant difference in advancing DEIA in the workplace. Even so, Powell said those changes may come slowly, and be somewhat limited.

“We do have to realize that there are a lot of big, historic buildings that our folks are occupying. To do any type of new construction in those buildings is next to impossible — we get that,” Powell said. “So, only where space allows, the agency agreed to provide for gender-neutral bathrooms. Even where there weren’t commitments that we could get in the actual article, we are seeing things change. We put the spotlight on it. And I think that in and of itself has been successful.”

Whistleblower protections for employees

In addition to the DEIA article, another new contract provision mirrors EPA’s scientific integrity policy, aiming to firm up a workplace culture that promotes strong scientific and ethical standards.

In any cases where employees suspect a violation of EPA’s integrity policy, the collective bargaining agreement confirms whistleblower protections for any employee who reports an allegation of scientific misconduct at work.

“Because it’s a contract article, if the agency doesn’t act on it, [that would] kick us into our grievance procedure,” Powell said. “And once you go through step one, step two [of the grievance procedure], the final step is an independent arbitrator. So, in those most serious, grave situations, we’re going to have a third party be able to step in and weigh in on the allegations.”

Powell said adding the new “scientific integrity” provision in the contract is specifically important for EPA. Part of the reason AFGE wanted to include that article in the new collective bargaining agreement was to hedge against a future possibility of what she said were previous agency setbacks during the Trump administration.

“This was the opportunity to provide that layer of protection for our staff,” Powell said. “It’s not just the scientists, it’s anyone who is using that data for decision-making. It could be your engineer; it could be your inspector who happens to be an environmental protection specialist. Everyone enjoys the protection under that article.”

After first agreeing to restore collective bargaining, office space and official time back in 2021, AFGE and EPA worked for years to reach the now final, four-year contract. If there is mutual agreement between the two parties, the contract can then continually be extended in one year increments after the initial four years.

Both parties, each in their own way, described the new agreement as a success for the agency’s workforce. For Powell, the tensions during negotiations and the long hours of work to reach the agreement were well worth it.

“If that means we get one more gender-neutral bathroom, or if we get one more employee who feels safe coming to the workplace expressing their gender the way they choose, then that’s a win for us,” Powell said. “[Agency leaders are] not only getting the pressure from the union — they’re hearing it from their own, from within. And I think we’re going to see tremendous change.”

The post EPA finalizes union contract, but AFGE wary of telework’s future first appeared on Federal News Network.

Leaders at TSA and AFGE signed off on a new seven-year collective bargaining agreement (CBA) Thursday afternoon, covering some 42,000 transportation security officers working in airports across the country. The agency and labor officials penned the document at a signing ceremony at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York.

The new CBA replaces a previous and relatively limited labor-management agreement between the two parties. It also comes after TSA employees recently received, and later maintained, a substantial pay increase. Prior to those changes, the agency was struggling significantly with staff recruitment and retention.

“If we didn’t have this CBA, if we didn’t have this pay package, I would submit to you, we probably wouldn’t have a TSA in five or 10 years,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said at Thursday’s signing ceremony. “That’s how important it is.”

The pay raises, which in some cases resulted in 31% salary boosts, brought TSA pay in line with the rest of the federal government. As a result, the agency is already reporting more interest in job openings, and drastically reduced attrition rates. In April, Pekoske told House lawmakers that staff attrition has fallen by 9% since the historic pay raises last year. TSA’s fiscal 2025 budget request includes funding to continue the raise, as well as provide more career development opportunities for agency employees.

Under the new agreement, transportation security officers will see a streamlined process for grievance and arbitration, expanded official time, fewer restrictions on sick leave, increased uniform allowances and opportunities for local collective bargaining. The new CBA expands the previous agreement from 14 articles, now to 37.

“These changes make TSA a place where Americans want to work,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said at Wednesday’s signing ceremony. “It makes the TSA a place where anybody will want to come to work and feel like they are part of the team.”

At Thursday’s event, Pekoske told reporters that the latest Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) results showed the highest ever engagement and satisfaction in the agency’s history. Pekoske added that he hopes the new contract will set the stage for an even better labor-management relationship moving forward.

“I think what we ought to be thinking about is, where can we go from here? How can we continue this pivot to make sure that as an agency, every single one of us has a commitment to our people?” Pekoske said. “We should use [the CBA] as a pivot point to even greater relationships amongst all of us together.”

The agreement is a milestone for the agency, especially to employees who have been working at TSA for many years, and who have experienced a slow yet major shift in the ability for workers to organize.

“When I first started at the agency, we weren’t even allowed to join the union, much less bargain with the agency,” Mac Johnson, vice president of AFGE Council 100, said Thursday. “It took until 2007 for us to be able to join AFGE, and we weren’t even able to sit down at the table with TSA until 2011. This contract is the first one to be bargained with similar rights to Title 5. But our journey isn’t complete yet.”

Title 5 is the personnel system that sets pay, benefits and performance standards for the vast majority of federal employees. When Congress created TSA in 2002, it excluded the agency’s employees from the General Schedule pay scale and other provisions of the Title 5 personnel system.

In effect, the new collective bargaining agreement provides Title 5 protections to TSA workers, but AFGE leaders are already looking ahead to the next chapter. They are aiming to secure Title 5 rights for the long haul by putting Title 5 into law for TSA employees. That would cement many of the CBA’s new provisions, extending them beyond the seven years the contract will cover.

A new bicameral bill from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) aims to accomplish just that. The Rights for the TSA Workforce Act, which the lawmakers introduced on May 14, would give all 60,000 TSA employees Title 5 protections. The legislation has gained both Democrat and Republican cosponsors.

In a video message at Thursday’s event, Thompson said the new collective bargaining agreement “will have a fundamental impact on TSA’s ability to recruit and maintain employees, and carry out its security mission,” but added that “there’s still work to be done. We need to ensure these improvements are made permanent in law so that no future administration can seek to undo them.”

The post TSA, AFGE see milestone contract as ‘pivot point’ for frontline workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.

In the months since expanding one of its districts overseas, the American Federation of Government Employees is gaining even more traction in representing federal employees stationed in Europe.

After federal employees working at two locations in Germany voted to unionize on May 1, the Federal Labor Relations Authority issued a certificate of representation Tuesday, marking the start of the negotiations process between AFGE and the U.S. Army.

“We’re at the very, very beginning — even prior to the beginning — of a bargaining relationship with these new bargaining units we’ve picked up,” AFGE District 14 Special Assistant Peter Winch said in an interview with Federal News Network. “We have model contracts that we’ll present to them and see if they’re willing to agree to those model contract languages, but it’s all negotiable. It’s not just AFGE staff; we have to ask [employees] what they want … We will try to get those changes that they are looking for.”

The two groups of feds who just gained union representation are IT workers at the Army Enterprise Service Desk, 2nd Signal Brigade, in Kaiserslautern, Germany, as well as non-appropriated fund (NAF) employees working various hospitality jobs at the Army’s Edelweiss Lodge and Resort in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. In total, there are about 200 newly represented employees between the two locations.

“We organized the ski instructors and the massage therapists, and also the cooks and the custodians — hotel guest services,” Winch said. “They voted for AFGE representation, and this is the result of people coming to us.”

The collective bargaining road ahead

The two elections in May add two more bargaining units to the already-existing unit of nearly 400 civilian employees working for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) at the Kaiserslautern Military Community Center Exchange in Germany. That group of employees voted for union representation with AFGE in December 2023, and was automatically covered under the existing contract between AAFES and AFGE.

But for the two new units, Winch said the collective bargaining process will work a little differently. Negotiations will begin soon on a new contract, in which AFGE plans to incorporate standard provisions like a grievance procedure, dues deductions and official time. But other components will likely be included in negotiations as well, such as safety equipment and a clothing allowance.

Having union representation also means employees have more of a voice when there are issues with management, or any concerns that arise on the job.

“It runs the gamut, from basic Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) issues — discrimination or nepotism in hiring — to issues that get down to the scheduling of work and assignments, and promotions and appraisals,” AFGE District 14 Legal Rights Attorney Javier Soto said in an interview. “Our goal is to work with employees to achieve that level of participation needed to get to that point of an election.”

Another common issue for civilian DoD employees in Europe is “bait-and-switch,” a tactic where management offers one job to an employee who agrees to go overseas, only for that employee to be told they would be working in a different position once they arrived. Having union representation, AFGE officials have said, should help employees push back in those instances.

Additionally, AFGE is looking to address the current work rotation policy for employees stationed in Europe. The policy places restrictions on how feds can serve overseas.

“Say, in a hospital, you want the continuity of care, you want people who understand the patient base that comes in there,” Winch said. “I don’t think the rotation policy is in the best interest of the government now. We don’t have a position on exactly what should happen — on whether it should be repealed or just changed. We want to hear from our members what they want and go from there.”

AFGE aiming to take representation further

The process to gaining representation at the two new locations also garnered pushback and resistance from some managers, Soto and Winch said. But moving forward, the sentiment from AFGE is still largely hopeful.

“In terms of traction, we’re getting there,” Soto said. “There are a lot of misconceptions about unions in the federal workplace in Europe. For both the employees and management, it’s a learning process.”

“We’ll just keep saying to bargaining unit employees, ‘This is your legal right to form a union, to be represented on the job,’” Winch added. “In case you want to change working conditions, or you face discipline, you’ll be better off if you have a union. The morale will be better, the mission will be accomplished better.”

Although there are so far just a couple hundred bargaining unit employees overseas, the growth may eventually become much more immense. Last year’s expansion of District 14 made about 10,000 civilian employees serving overseas in Europe eligible for AFGE representation. AFGE also recently ironed out a contract for AFGE Local 3712, representing employees stationed in Naples, Italy, who are part of the U.S. Naval Support Activity for the Europe and Africa Navy Region.

And AFGE is certainly aiming to take that representation further. The union expects more elections to come, and is hoping to expand to all Defense Health Agency employees in Europe, as well as those at the Defense Logistics Agency. At DHA and DLA, new bargaining units would come automatically under the already-existing master agreement. AFGE officials also plan to accommodate other groups of federal employees outside of DHA and DLA as the interest and needs arise.

“There are many thousands of federal DoD employees, especially in Europe, who could really use the union on the job,” Winch said. “AFGE is interested in representing all the DoD employees who want a union and our whole federation is finding this intriguing, to be able to go back into Europe with Zoom calls and be able to represent in a distant ‘tele-manner’ that we didn’t [use] pre-COVID. So, we’re trying to adapt and overcome. And I think it’s working.”

The post AFGE set to negotiate after more feds overseas opt for representation first appeared on Federal News Network.

Agencies are well on their way to reaching the Biden administration’s in-office goals for federal employees, but the Office of Management and Budget still plans to hold leaders accountable until they reach full compliance.

Based on conversations with federal leaders, agencies are roughly 80% of the way toward hitting the administration’s target for at least half of feds’ work hours being spent in the office, OMB Deputy Director for Management Jason Miller told House lawmakers Tuesday.

“We’ve been clear that our expectation is agencies are achieving at least 50%, while giving them flexibility for how to deliver,” Miller said during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing. “We’ll hold them accountable for that.”

That 80% figure comes about a year after OMB first directed agencies to increase in-office presence. An April 2023 memo intended to strike a balance between in-office work and telework, while giving agencies leeway to determine what that would look like in practice. But several committee Republicans appear to be growing impatient with what they view as too long of a timeline for returning federal employees to the office — and what they said is a lack of workforce data from OMB.

In particular, some committee members during Tuesday’s hearing questioned Miller on why White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’ pressure on agency leaders for in-office presence took place several years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It seems to me like COVID is ancient history right now,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said during the Oversight committee hearing Tuesday. “That email [from Zients], dated January 2024 — kind of recent — does it imply that things are going slower than your expectations?”

Echoing the stance that Zients has taken with agency heads, Miller said OMB expects agencies to completely follow through with implementing the 50% in-office presence — though he did not provide a specific deadline for implementation.

“The purpose of that approach was to strengthen teams and organizations, make sure that we had strong culture, make sure that we had innovative teams, make sure that we’re able to bring people on board,” Miller said during the hearing. At least half of federal employees never telework, as their job duties require them to be entirely on site, Miller added.

But in reaction to OMB’s return-to-office push, many federal employees as well as their unions have argued that telework is a crucial flexibility for strong federal recruitment and retention. They have repeatedly urged agencies to use lessons learned from the pandemic as a rationale to maintain higher telework levels — and not push a 50% return-to-office.

Office space concerns

In contrast, some Republican committee members said they believed a 50% in-office presence wasn’t a high enough goal. A few pointed to a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office, which revealed many agencies sitting at or below 25% capacity in their physical office spaces.

“For most of America, 50% would still seem like a low mark,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) said to Miller during the hearing. “I mean, granted, that would be progress compared to 25% … [but] we don’t have agencies coming to us and saying, ‘Well, we don’t need this building anymore, or we don’t need this office space, so we can reduce our budget here to make up for it there’ — so I would just encourage you to continue to work on that.”

GAO, though, has said the challenge of handling federal office space long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal property management has remained on GAO’s High Risk List since 2003. The underutilization of federal office space is a more complex issue than can’t be blamed solely on telework, GAO officials have said. In fact, by GAO’s calculations, even if an agency had 100% staff attendance, the office space it would still only be about two-thirds utilized.

The Public Buildings Reform Board has reported that agencies now have a “unique opportunity” to reinvest their budgets into more modern office amenities, if they’re able to sell or otherwise dispose of unneeded real estate.

During the hearing, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) encouraged OMB to follow suit of the private sector and look at ways to cut back on total office holdings by maintaining telework at least to some degree.

“The private sector sees the value in working from home, and so they’re capitalizing on that,” Lynch said. “They don’t need all this expensive space now … they’re operating more efficiently.”

Miller said the administration is heading in that direction with its efforts for agencies, but is still leaving room for adjustment later on, if needed.

“In crafting our governmentwide guidance, we have followed very closely the research and actions by the private sector,” Miller said. “Ultimately, we need to compete for talent … And right now, the research suggests that where we’re landing is the right answer. But of course, we’re going to be dynamic going forward.”

Additionally, Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) pointed to reports showing that remote work and telework help increase diversity in the federal workforce.

“The administration has a significant amount of leverage to promote changes in the workforce, making it more reflective for people of all backgrounds … for people who face all types of barriers, like access to transportation, taking care of an aging relative or having to pick up their children from school,” Brown said.

Frustrations over in-office, telework data

At the same time, several committee members voiced concerns about delays and backlogs in public-facing federal services, which Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he blames on telework.

“You can see the frustration on our side of the aisle because we don’t believe the federal government is any more efficient or productive with its new, wide-open telework policy,” Comer said. “[Caseworkers] have had significant difficulty getting people on the phone at the [Department of Veterans Affairs], at the IRS, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture — the agencies go on and on … It appears that’s because they have a lot of their workforce still working from home.”

In contrast, a large majority of federal employees themselves have said telework actually improves their performance, and has positive ripple effects on agency recruitment and retention. A recent Federal News Network survey showed that about two-thirds of feds said they’re more productive while working from home.

During the hearing, Comer once again doubled down on his push to get deeper telework data from OMB and other agencies — asking OMB for details on the number of teleworking employees across government, and how telework impacts productivity. Unsatisfied with OMB’s response, Comer said he doubted that agencies have the information on hand at all.

“No one says we’re totally opposed to telework — we just want to see data that shows it’s more efficient,” Comer said. “And I don’t think you all have that data.”

The Office of Personnel Management releases an annual telework report, detailing figures on how many federal employees are teleworking at each agency. And the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) offers additional data on federal telework.

But in Congress, the push for deeper data continues to intensify. OMB is nearing a congressional deadline from the fiscal 2024 appropriations package, which tells OMB to turn over all agencies’ return-to-office “action plans” by late June.

The post OMB holding agencies ‘accountable’ for 50% in-office presence first appeared on Federal News Network.

When most agencies go to the bargaining table with their federal union, there’s already a clear starting point for negotiations. Labor and management officials usually agree to reopen a handful of articles from their existing collective bargaining agreement, then discuss and implement the various changes each party wants to make.

But for the Defense Health Agency, that’s not the case. After the agency’s employees unionized, the American Federation of Government Employees spent the better part of the last two years figuring out what employees’ rights will look like, encompassing everything from relocations and overtime work, to how to handle disciplinary actions.

“There’s no prior agreement, so you’re literally starting from scratch — you have to bargain everything for the first time,” AFGE Deputy General Counsel Cathie McQuiston said in an interview.

Although DHA employees voted to gain union representation with AFGE back in 2022, the labor and management parties didn’t open negotiations until October 2023. DHA finally reached a baseline master agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees on April 5.

The new interim agreement outlines, for the first time ever, cohesive policies on leave, work hours, official time, telework and much more for some 38,000 agency employees nationwide.

“This was a recognition for both parties, [deciding] jointly what are [the] basic matters that are important to have — rules of the road for both the union and management to follow,” McQuiston said.

DHA did not immediately respond to Federal News Network’s request for comment about the new interim agreement.

Building from an initial agreement for DHA headquarters, and with some minor tweaks, the interim contract now applies to all DHA bargaining unit employees across the country. DHA’s nationwide agreement encompasses hundreds of locations all under a single contract, similar to AFGE’s structure within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“We had just bargained [the headquarters agreements] in the last six months, we had gotten them through agency head review,” McQuiston said. “It didn’t make sense for either side to sit down and start from scratch when we’d just bargained something … that is [already] appropriate for the agency.”

DHA employees will have “input and influence”

DHA, first created 10 years ago, initially had a fairly limited mission of offering shared services to military medical organizations. But since 2017, the agency has been growing significantly. It now encompasses practically all aspects of the Military Health System. As part of that expansion, DoD reorganized about 45,000 health care employees into DHA, most of whom were previously working for individual military branches.

An estimated 75% of employees at DHA headquarters didn’t have union representation before the 2022 election that brought in AFGE as the union representative for the employees.

“Prior to them being transferred and combined in DHA, the Army had their own rules and regulations, the Navy had theirs, the Air Force had theirs. Everybody was dealing with different rules, different policies,” McQuiston said. “Now the representation provides the opportunity for employees to engage … and have input and influence when the decisions are made, and before they’re made.”

Now with the interim agreement in place, AFGE and DHA will move forward on negotiations within the next three months, with the goal of reaching agreements on even more articles to include in the contract.

But the exact parameters of what those negotiations will entail are up in the air. That’s because AFGE is also still working on establishing a bargaining council, which will eventually comprise agency employees who will be elected as representatives of the overall DHA workforce.

“They will be responsible for doing the bargaining, making the calls on priority,” McQuiston said. “We’re right now in discussions about what articles we’ll move. We certainly want to get the views of the workforce about issues that are important to them in the workplace day-to-day and incorporate their concerns.”

Although it’ll still be a while before everything is completely set, McQuiston said she believes the representation will have a positive impact for DHA personnel, even in the short term. Under the interim agreement, DHA employees now have an official process, for instance, to flag concerns for management, and official documentation of their rights they can point back to, if necessary.

McQuistion said especially with the recent executive order reestablishing labor-management forums as a requirement for all agencies, she hopes DHA employees will have more opportunities to be involved in the decision-making process for any workforce changes from management, and to be able to offer input along the way, rather than only dealing with implementation of workplace changes after the fact.

“I think it will provide a better workplace for the employees at the end of the day,” McQuiston said. “This is a big change, it’s a huge opportunity [and] I think it’s a huge net positive for these employees.”

The post DHA, AFGE cement workplace policies for 38K DoD health employees first appeared on Federal News Network.

Earlier this spring, several House lawmakers introduced a new bill to address a burgeoning post-pandemic trend: the use of employee monitoring technologies.

The “Stop Spying Bosses Act” would create new rules around the use of worker surveillance technologies. It would also establish a new division at the Labor Department to regulate workplace surveillance.

The legislation comes in response to an explosion in the use of everything from video surveillance to keylogging software to keep tabs on employees. A 2023 survey of 1,000 companies with remote or hybrid workforces found the vast majority use some form of employee monitoring. There’s even a new term for tech that enables this kind of continuous activity tracking: “bossware.”

As the country’s largest employer, where does the federal government stand? To date, there’s little evidence that federal agencies and their managers are taking up the more intrusive employee monitoring practices being embraced in the private sector.

But the unions that represent feds are also guarding against the potential as the technology evolves. National Federation of Federal Employees Executive Director Steve Lenkart said the issue is intertwined with the evolution of telework.

“As our technology improves, and we have more capabilities for people not to be in a centralized place, we’re going to have to invest in technologies that make it easier for that employee to function,” Lenkart said in an interview. “And there’s always going to be questions of supervision. And then it leads to questions of surveillance.”

SSA watchdog monitors employee computers

There is at least one instance where federal employees working remotely have had their computers monitored for performance.

In 2021, employees at the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General were subject to a survey of computer logs and telephone records to measure time online. Some employees were subject to disciplinary action or terminated.

While the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) — which represents more than 90% of SSA OIG agents – pushed back on that practice, SSA Inspector General Gale Ennis argued it was necessary “as stewards of taxpayer dollars, to hold employees accountable, when appropriate.”

“Failing to do so would be detrimental to public service, the OIG mission, and the morale of the many employees who go above and beyond in their contributions every day,” Ennis wrote in a September 2021 letter to the union.

Later that month, the FLEOA took a vote in which 98% of responding employees said they had “no confidence” in Ennis’s leadership. The use of computer logs for employee monitoring was among the issues cited by the union in its statement on the vote.

More than two years later, an FLEOA spokeswoman said the issue around the computer monitoring has yet to be resolved. “To our knowledge, the data analytics from employee monitoring are not being used for disciplinary actions as they were before, but they could be using it for other reasons,” the spokeswoman told Federal News Network.

In a statement for this story, FLEOA President Mat Silverman said SSA OIG employees were terminated “based on computer logs often without any corroborating or mitigating evidence from an employee’s immediate supervisor, raising serious doubts about the legitimacy of the terminations.”

“As agencies become increasingly skeptical about the benefits of remote work, we do fear the trend of remote monitoring will continue; however, we hope the strong criticism, high attrition, and decreased morale SSA OIG experienced will send a strong message to other agencies that this is neither an effective nor appropriate workplace policy,” Silverman said. “Ultimately, a workplace is successful when there is mutual trust, transparency, and confidence between employees and their leadership. Conversely, remote monitoring is demeaning to employees and undermines these important workplace values.”

In response to questions about the use of computer monitoring, an SSA OIG spokeswoman said, “Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General supervisors measure productivity and performance of their employees using performance plans.”

‘No rulebook’ on employee monitoring

As the telework era continues to evolve, Lenkart said it will take time to strike the balance between supervision and surveillance.

“I think there’s going to be a little bit of operational uncomfortableness,” he said. “If you don’t trust your employee enough where you have to watch them minute-by-minute, then that’s probably not a good candidate to be working home or the supervisor has trust issues that need to be addressed. There’s no rulebook written on this yet.”

While workplace collaboration technologies, like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, are key to remote work, some unions are keeping a close eye on how those technologies are used by management. The National Treasury Employees Union, for instance, said it “opposes the use of technology for anything other than its intended purpose.”

In a statement, NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said the union negotiates language in contracts that any “new or upgraded workplace technology cannot be used to track and monitor employees, measure productivity or replace existing official methods for tracking time and attendance.”

“For example, monitoring an employee’s colored-dot status on Microsoft Teams is not an indicator of productivity or attendance, and we would enforce our contracts to contest agency managers trying to use it as the basis of discipline or an adverse action against an employee,” Greenwald continued.

On its “Telework FAQ” page, the Office of Personnel Management encourages supervisors to focus on what an employee is accomplishing, rather than what it “looks like” an individual is doing.

“By focusing on the work product instead of the work activity, many supervisors find they are better able to communicate clear expectations to their employees,” OPM writes. “The resulting agreement on job expectations often leads to increases in employee productivity and job satisfaction.”

OPM did not respond to questions about the potential use of employee monitoring technology within the federal government.

In a 2021 blog, the Government Accountability Office underlined how first-line supervisors are key to reporting whether they think an employee is abusing time and attendance requirements. While agencies are increasingly using automated timekeeping systems and other internal controls to detect misconduct, managers are “still the most important internal control for managing time and attendance,” GAO wrote.

That’s a sentiment Lenkart reiterated in highlighting the disparate nature of many federal jobs and the difficulty of measuring performance from time spent on a computer.

“In the end, it’s always going to come back to the local supervisor to determine whether you have a good employee or not,” he said.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Derace Lauderdale

Close to 80% of employers use monitoring software to track employee performance and online activity.

Source: CNBC

The post With ‘spying bosses’ on the rise, where do federal agencies stand on employee monitoring? first appeared on Federal News Network.

Ahead of a September deadline for agencies and unions to finalize their plans for recreating labor-management forums, the Office of Personnel Management is offering guidance on how federal leaders can best meet the new expectations.

Alongside a push to improve apprenticeship opportunities, a March 6 executive order from President Joe Biden called on agencies and federal unions to recreate the relatively informal forums. If implemented effectively, labor-management forums can improve employee satisfaction, engagement and organizational performance, while also mitigating possible disputes between the two parties, OPM said in March 13 guidance.

“We’ve seen examples where labor-management forums have worked on improving safety policies particularly for employees that work in hazardous jobs. There are many opportunities for them to tackle some tough issues that happen every day in every workplace,” OPM Deputy Associate Director for Accountability and Workforce Relations Tim Curry said in an interview. “We think that agencies and unions should see this as an opportunity to improve how agency operations work.”

As part of the executive order earlier this month, agencies now have until Sept. 3 to create and submit implementation plans to OPM on how they’ll reestablish labor-management forums. They’re a way for representatives from both management and a union to collaborate on personnel matters. The forums, usually outside the scope collective bargaining agreements, are meant to provide opportunities to come to agreements on any concerns or questions before personnel issues escalate.

Under the new executive order, and the subsequent OPM guidance, agencies and unions will also have to show through metrics and data how the forums are impacting engagement, satisfaction and organizational performance.

Agencies and federal unions have used labor-management forums for years as a tool to address employee concerns and aim to improve the workplace. In many cases, they can lead to savings in both time and costs.

“They work together to identify issues in the workplace,” Curry said. “They propose ideas and solutions to address these issues in a way to better serve the public and actually accomplish the agency mission in a better way.”

Labor-management forums had been around for years, up until a 2017 executive order during the Trump administration disbanded them.

In 2021, under the Biden administration, OPM once again green-lit labor-management forums. But the use of the forums was not required until Biden signed the new executive order, officially rescinding the 2017 order from Trump in the process.

Now with the new executive order, “some agencies might already be ahead of the game, and others may have some catching up to do,” Curry said.

Of course, each agency will have a somewhat different approach the executive order’s requirements. Labor-management forums, OPM said, are not one-size-fits-all. But the guidance still offers some broad strategies agencies can consider, such as developing a shared vision for what the forum should aim to achieve, and what issues it will cover.

“We would recommend that they focus on addressing each other’s interests and working together on developing mutually agreeable solutions that address those interests,” Curry said. “But also, agency leadership needs to show support for the forums from the top down, as well as the union leadership. We would want them to model the behavior that they would like to see lower-level managers and union representatives show.”

In that work, Curry said agencies will also have to evaluate and address any remaining obstacles in labor-management relations that stem from a series of now-rescinded executive orders from the Trump administration, which previously limited the scope of collective bargaining.

“We want to confirm with agencies that there are no more outstanding issues, which might be obstacles to moving forward on other issues for the forums to address,” Curry said.

Trying to get plans set up by September could cause agencies or unions to run into a few trouble spots. For example, OPM said in its guidance that there may be some resistance from either party, or even agency employees themselves.

In those instances, Curry said it’s important to keep in mind how the forums are meant to be structured, and what their real purpose is.

“Forums are not co-management arrangements, as some may believe, and we advise forums to address this early on,” Curry said. “Management is encouraged to have discussions with unions about issues before they make a management decision, and on the other hand, unions aren’t waiving their collective bargaining rights on matters discussed in the forums.”

Federal Labor Relations Authority Chairman Susan Tsui Grundmann said although the work to reach agreements in labor-management may at times be challenging, the results can be tremendous.

“One recent example in the wake of all our budgetary issues and to avoid furloughing our own employees, we actually gave up a whole floor in our headquarters, consolidating two floors into one. And I told our union vice president that this just had the makings of a disaster,” Grundmann said during a March 27 FLRA town hall. “But his remark was, ‘it makes it a whole lot easier when you get along.’ So whatever the future holds, we commit to have our internal union beside us to guide us and to allow us to lead by example.”

Both leading up to the September deadline and after it passes, agencies can lean on resources from OPM to address any concerns or questions. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service also offers guidance and advice on setting up and using the forums.

“These forums provide frontline employees with a more meaningful voice in agency operations and foster discussions about improving the effectiveness of government services,” National Treasury Employees Union National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement earlier this month. “It is our experience that pre-decisional input inherent in conversations between labor and management is a productive means to give employees a say in agency decisions, solve problems in a non-adversarial way, address workplace issues that hinder efficiency and improve services to the American people.”

The post OPM outlines how agencies, unions can recreate labor-management forums first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Census Bureau is looking to roll out a remote work policy it drafted at the end of last year, but is rethinking how many employees can opt in, after Congress recently set minimum utilization rates for federal buildings.

The Census Bureau agreed to a remote work policy last December, and a working group is working on implementation details.

Census Bureau Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer Ron Jarmin told employees in an all-staff email last week that once an implementation plan is finalized in the coming weeks, employees will be approved for remote work “in special situations determined by the remote work implementation working group.”

“Our policy must follow departmental and administrative guidelines and will have limits which significantly impact the number of employees who will be approved for remote work across the Census Bureau,” Jarmin wrote.

Jarmin said the bureau strongly recommends employees do not move outside the commuting area of their official duty station until they receive remote work approval.

Meanwhile, the Census Bureau is reconfiguring its headquarters to bring more Commerce Department employees under one roof.

American Federation of Government Employees Council 241 President Johnny Zuagar said in an interview with Federal News Network that the Census Bureau headquarters is undergoing renovations and giving up 50% of its headquarters space to accommodate employees from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The bureau’s headquarters, he added, will shift to a hoteling model following the renovations, meaning employees will have to reserve a desk for the days they plan to work in-person.

“We have done what they’re saying. We looked at our real estate, and we redid it. We have consolidated with other agencies, we are moving to smaller spaces that are at other locations. So we’re doing exactly what they’re asking,” Zuagar said. “We’re using the space efficiently and effectively. We are making adjustments. This is going to take a couple of years to know where the right balance is, but we’ll find that out.”

AFGE Council 241 Vice President Vickie Martin said Census Bureau employees who work outside the Suitland, Maryland headquarters are expected to work in the office a minimum of two days per pay period — although in-office expectations vary by position. Zuagar said some employees are working in-person every day.

Martin said the union initially expected more Census employees would be eligible to enroll in the remote work policy, but language in the fiscal 2024 spending deal set minimum occupancy requirements for federal buildings, and “handcuffed us a little bit” on the scope of remote work.

Lawmakers, in the spending deal for the rest of fiscal 2024, are requiring agencies with an office space utilization rate of less than 60% to report to Congress on their efforts to reduce their real estate footprint.

Agencies as part of the appropriations package will also have to provide information on the average number and percentage of employees working in the office during a typical two-week pay period, as well as their recent telework policies.

“We’re not going to give up on expanding that and getting further flexibilities for our people. But, we’re also not going to jeopardize what they’ve been able to gain, as far as flexibilities now,” Martin said.

A Census Bureau spokeswoman said in a statement that the bureau’s headquarters is under construction to modernize the building and bring Bureau of Labor Statistics employees into the building. During the renovations, the spokeswoman said “employees have been working under maximum telework.”

The bureau expects to reopen its headquarters building this summer.

“Employees have been notified that they will receive a 60-day notice before headquarters begins a phased reopening and will be required to comply with existing policies upon their return,” the spokeswoman said.

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The post Census Bureau rethinks scope of remote work policy, consolidates office space first appeared on Federal News Network.