Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson and chief operating officer Chris Neal are ordering county office workers back to the office, three days a week at least. That’s the gist of an Aug. 10 all-staff memo they sent with just hours notice to the county’s biggest union.
According to the memo, about three-fourths of County employees already work fully or partly in person. The roughly one in four who work entirely remotely (about 1,000 workers in all) will get 90 days notice once their work sites are ready for them, with a goal of having everyone back to in-person work by July 1, 2027.
Leaders of AFSCME Local 88, which represents about 4,000 county employees, say it came as a shock. Over the previous year, union officers had asked county leaders if a return-to-work plan was in the offing. Union officers say instead of engaging with them during routine labor-management meetings, Pederson and Neal deliberately kept them in the dark while they deliberated for six months over whether to impose a return-to-office mandate. The plan was also kept from other county commissioners.
Local 88 is pushing back against the return-to-office order, arguing that the county’s existing flexible telework arrangements have worked well and have resulted in improved employee retention and job satisfaction without a loss of productivity.
Remote work may also have saved the county money, the union says: Since remote work took off in response to the COVID pandemic, the county has downsized office space, saving taxpayer dollars by not renewing leases. Local 88 has requested information from the county to determine how much money was saved.
Because workers were allowed to work remotely full-time, some also relocated out of the area. And many new employees were hired with the county’s full knowledge that they don’t live in the area.
“The county specifically recruited people for all different kinds of programs, knowing that they lived outside of Multnomah County, and agreeing that we’re that they were going to be 100% telework,” Local 88 vice president Rachel O’Rourke told the Labor Press.
Moving back to the area would be a hardship for those workers, the union says.
“When we talked to the chair about that,” O’Rourke recalled, “she just said, ‘Well, people are going to have to make difficult decisions.’”
O’Rourke’s job is as a call taker on the county’s 24-hour crisis line, talking people down from danger and getting them help. Her department has doubled since 2020.
“We went from about 25 to over 50 employees, so they don’t they don’t have a space for us where everyone could return to work again.”
“We’re in this in the situation where we have two people who are making decisions that impact so many thousands of workers without even thinking that they should be talking to the union.”
In response to the memo, Local 88 demanded that the county negotiate over the return-to-work mandate, not just impose it. But the county says it doesn’t have to bargain over it because its collective bargaining agreement with the union leaves telework up to the discretion of managers.
So Local 88 has shifted to Plan B, filing a wave of grievances for individual members, 15 so far, and insisting that they each employee get a chance to present their circumstances rather than have their grievances consolidated.
That could push resolution out for months. Pederson’s term ends in January. Local 88 is banking on hopes that her successor will be more willing to talk to workers and their union before ordering across-the-board changes that could affect their work life.
County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards, considered the leading contender in a three-way race for chair, made her position known in an email to the union three days after the return-to-office memo.
“Major changes to working conditions should not be announced and implemented first, with employee engagement occurring after the fact,” Brim-Edwards wrote. “Represented County employees deserve a genuine opportunity to inform decisions that directly affect their work conditions.”
