SerpApi.Org
The union of California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment sponsored a billboard along westbound Interstate 80 to advocate against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s return-to-office mandate.
Newsom’s RTO order, which requires state workers to commute to the office four days per week, took effect July 1. Many employees said doing so has disrupted their lives by increasing expenses related to childcare and commuting.
Unveiled Monday, the billboard emphasizes the detrimental effects of the RTO order on working parents. The sign, which will be displayed for one month, features a picture of a crying child alongside the words, “When flexible work disappears working parents lose time, money, and support.” It is located about a quarter mile west of Jefferson Boulevard in West Sacramento, targeting commuter traffic as it enters the city.
CASE Secretary Lulu Gomez, senior counsel for the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, said the billboard aims to draw attention to the struggle of simultaneously working and taking care of children - an issue that many union members have brought up since the RTO order took effect, according to Gomez.
“We heard from so many members that being forced back into the office after experiencing what it was like to work remotely was going to be a huge struggle,” Gomez said. “They’d have to completely rearrange their lives that they had adjusted to during the pandemic and in the years following.”
Gomez and CASE President Talene Ghazarian, a special projects attorney at the California Department of Health Care Services, said the issue is close to their hearts as working parents of young children. In particular, Ghazarian said, procuring childcare four days per week has created a financial burden for many CASE members.
“During this time, where we’ve been working remotely, everything in the world has changed,” Ghazarian said. “We’re not living in the world of six years ago. For one, everything is more expensive and we didn’t get pay increases to even remotely keep up with inflation. In fact, we were asked to take pay cuts. … With the little bit of flexibility that telework has permitted, (state workers) have been able to make ends meet.”
The union decided to put up a billboard as part of a multi-faceted public campaign to raise awareness of the drawbacks of the RTO order. They decided to target the Sacramento area to reach many state workers - and state lawmakers - on their commute each day.
“We wanted to focus on the Sacramento area because that’s where I think it would have the most impact,” Gomez said. “This is where the bulk of the state workers are located and it’s where a lot of this push has been happening to get people back into the offices.”
CASE approved the billboard at its board meeting at the end of May. Union members spent the following months deciding on the messaging of the billboard and coordinating logistics, such as where it would be displayed and for how long.
CASE is a co-sponsor of Assembly Bill 1729, which would place the authority to mandate telework in the hands of individual agencies and departments. The bill includes a provision for agency-specific “telework dashboards” that display the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of telework programs, and would require each state agency to re-evaluate its telework policy every 10 years.
The union also filed a lawsuit in May challenging the RTO order, which argued that requiring workers to commute to the office each day would cause adverse environmental effects. According to the suit, the California Environmental Quality Act mandates agencies to complete a report on the additional carbon dioxide emitted by commuters post-RTO. A judge for the Superior Court of Alameda County ruled that the suit did not require a temporary restraining order in a June 29 decision.
Gomez and Ghazarian said CASE’s advocacy and legal work opposing RTO is part of a broad attempt to reverse what many believe is a counterintuitive mandate.
“You would expect California, of all places, to be leaning into this type of innovation,” Ghazarian said. “We’re touting making AI increasingly available, but then in the next sentence doubt the ability of individuals to be productive through the use of technology despite six years of showing that it’s very possible. It’s just not adding up.”
