Punching In: DOL Moves Ahead With In-Office Mandate for Staffers

Monday morning musings for workplace watchers.

Labor Department RTO|UAW Prosecutor Speaks

Rebecca Rainey: US Department of Labor employees will have to report in-person about 50% of the time starting early next year, per an email last week from acting Labor Secretary Julie Su.

Staffers who are currently teleworking will be required to be at their “duty station”—which could be in-office or out in the field—at least five days per two-week pay period starting Jan. 28, Su wrote in the Nov. 28 email to staff that was obtained by Bloomberg Law.

The move is partly due to the fact that “reliance on maximum telework has made it difficult to develop relationships with colleagues and build a sense of community—the very things that often make work most fulfilling,” Su explained.

The DOL confirmed the validity of the email.

DOL managers, senior executive service level employees, and political employees already have been back at the office at this frequency level since Oct. 22, according to the email.

That change was part of the DOL’s response to the White House Office of Management and Budget’s request earlier this year that federal agencies update their “work environment plans” with a focus on “substantially” increasing in-person work.

The announcement comes amid growing pressure on federal agencies to transition away from remote work post-pandemic. In addition to OMB’s request, President Joe Biden has been increasing his calls for the federal workforce to return in-person.

Federal agencies’ telework policies have also been the subject of several House Oversight subcommittee hearings in recent weeks, focused on whether agencies “are measuring the impact of telework on their ability to put American taxpayers and agency missions first.”

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who chairs the oversight subcommittee with jurisdiction over the federal workforce, requested detailed plans from the DOL and other agencies on their telework policies and performance earlier this year. In its response, the DOL made clear that telework doesn’t alter how the agency evaluates employee performance.

The latest decision from the DOL “is a move in the right direction” Sessions said, but he expressed skepticism that it would “substantially enhance productivity.”

American Federation of Government Employees Local 12, which represents DOL employees in the Washington, D.C., metro area, said it was “blindsided” by the decision.

Despite AFGE Local 12’s request for a briefing and bargaining over the change, the agency decided to announce the new policy without meeting with the union, President La Rhonda Gamble said. The local has also made multiple requests to sit down with acting Secretary Su since she took over leadership of the agency, but still hasn’t been able to schedule a meeting, Gamble said.

The agency’s decisions are “very upsetting” and “very concerning,” she said.

“The Department is committed to working with its union partners through the bargaining process in advance of that implementation date,” a DOL spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Read More:

• EEOC Reaches Deal With Union on Phased Return-to-Office Plan
• EPA Union Rejects White House Call to Return to the Office
• American Work-From-Home Rates Drop to Lowest Since the Pandemic
• Punching In: Rank and File Returning to Labor Department Desks

Matthew Schneider of the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan smiles while speaking to members of the media outside the federal court in Detroit on April 2, 2019.

Photographer: Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Ian Kullgren: You may have noticed one key person who wasn’t around during the United Auto Workers strike: Neil Barofsky, the Jenner & Block partner tapped to clean up corruption in the union.

Barofsky’s appointment was the culmination of an investigation into a UAW scheme that began to unravel in 2017 when the feds blew the lid off a bribery ring at the Fiat-Chrysler (now Stellantis) training center near Detroit. The company was greasing the palms of senior UAW officials to keep them “fat, dumb, and happy,” one company official told authorities.

But under the union’s consent decree with the Justice Department, the federal monitor can play no role in collective bargaining. Why?

To shed some light, Bloomberg Law caught up with Matthew Schneider, the former US attorney who prosecuted the UAW case.

Schneider offered a behind-the-scenes look at one of the biggest union corruption cases in history. In his most candid interview to date on the case, he explained how his office sought to rid the union of corruption without taking it over entirely—and tarnishing workers who did nothing wrong.

“The monitor’s job isn’t—I never thought it was to take over the union,” said Schneider, who now leads investigations and white collar defense for Honigman LLP. “And collective bargaining is what a union does. It was more to make sure that the election for one person, one vote—the direct democracy—was done appropriately and that other reporting of corruption could be done.”

While the case began with the Fiat-Chrysler training center, it quickly expanded into direct theft by union officers and illegal kickbacks from vendors. Collective bargaining was just a small piece of the puzzle, Schneider said.

“I just didn’t feel like having the monitor involved in all that day-to-day process of collective bargaining was necessary, because not all of collective bargaining was corrupt,” said Schneider, a Trump appointee. “To have the monitor so involved in that, I think it sends the message that the union can’t even perform its basic functions of collective bargaining without oversight. And that’s really not accurate.”

Prosecutors didn’t come to the conclusion that the UAW fit a pattern to be charged as a racketeering organization, which would mean the organization was compromised from head to toe.

“It could have been done,” Schneider said. “But I just felt like there were so many people in the union who were not racketeers.”

“Why paint them with the corruption of leadership?” he added. “That’s why I ultimately decided it wasn’t fair to the line workers.”

We’re punching out. Daily Labor Report subscribers, please check in for updates during the week, and feel free to reach out to us.