President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that he plans to fire federal employees who continue to telework rather than show up in person at government agencies.
“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Trump said in a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump and his advisers have said they want to institute mass layoffs in the federal workforce and will strip away remote work options so that people quit. But firing federal employees for working from home is easier said than done, since many federal union contracts allow for remote or hybrid work schedules.
The incoming president lashed out at such arrangements and appeared to reference a new deal reached between the Social Security Administration and the union representing more than 40,000 employees.
Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley, an appointee of President Joe Biden, recently agreed to a contract that extends telework scheduling into 2029, Bloomberg reported.
“It was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it,” Trump said.
That union, the American Federation of Government Employees, said Monday that “rumors of widespread federal telework” are “simply untrue.”
“More than half of federal employees cannot telework at all because of the nature of their jobs, only ten percent of federal workers are remote, and those who have a hybrid arrangement spend over sixty percent of working hours in the office,” the union’s president, Everett Kelley, said in a statement responding to Trump’s comments.
Like other workplaces, many federal agencies instituted remote work during the pandemic and have not fully returned to in-office scheduling. A lot of workers cherish the flexibility, so their unions have been trying to lock in hybrid arrangements in their collective bargaining agreements.
The president-elect’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” an advisory body run by Trump allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is already recommending remote scheduling be taken away. Musk and Ramaswamy have openly said the aim is to prompt federal workers to resign. (Editor’s note: Ramaswamy owns a stake in HuffPost’s parent company, BuzzFeed.)
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” the pair recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
The efforts to end remote work could lead to legal battles, especially if the Trump administration brushes aside guarantees in current union contracts. Kelley said such agreements are “binding and enforceable under the law.”
“We trust the incoming administration will abide by their obligations to honor lawful union contracts,” he said. “If they fail to do so, we will be prepared to enforce our rights.”
Democracy In The Balance
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