Our Union team met and conferred with EDD twice, first on June 13 and again on June 17, regarding their plans to implement return to office guidance requiring employees to work in-office four days a week.
In our discussions our team raised concerns from our represented employees that are impacted by this shift back to working in-office after multiple years of successfully working remotely. Specifically, Our questions focused on understanding how a shift to working in-office would serve the needs of EDD to carry out its mission and on gathering details about day to day impacts on our represented employees.
In response EDD shared that one of their main objectives related to having employees work more often in-office is to allow employees more opportunities for collaboration, even though they were not able to explain why in-person collaboration is different than the current work environment where employees collaborate virtually. EDD also noted that individual branches would have the authority to make decisions about how to implement return to in office work in their own branches, and that there may be differences in implementation timelines due to space and operational needs.
Our team was not swayed by the department’s position with regards to in-office work implementation and expressed our concerns to EDD that the department wasn’t fully prepared for implementation as there were too many unknown details related to the implementation.
This meeting is just one part of our ongoing work to pushback on sweeping return to office requirements being placed on SEIU Local 1000 represented employees. Our EDD member leaders are also working closely on organizing activities in relation to this implementation, and we encourage you to connect with your local stewards and leaders to get involved.
Please see our RTO page to share your story about how telework works for California and find out additional ways to get more involved in our Union’s fight to retain telework for our represented employees.