Part I: February 13, 2023 When President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address on March 1, 2022, that the “vast majority” of federal workers would soon return to the office, workers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had been waiting months for a post-Covid office re-entry plan.

Three days after Biden’s address, the EEOC’s employees were provided with a plan. It had no remote work policy and ignored months of engagement with decision-makers, Rachel Shonfield, president of the union representing more than 1,500 EEOC employees, told Bisnow.

“My phone lit up … folks were saying, ‘Why did we fill out these surveys, why did we go to these focus groups, because nobody listened!’” Shonfield said. “People were so completely demoralized.”

After the policy was unilaterally imposed in May, her union, the American Federation of Government Employees Council 216, filed an unfair labor practice charge against the EEOC. The Federal Labor Relations Authority sided with the union in June, arguing that the EEOC hadn’t been negotiating in good faith. The two sides reached a temporary agreement with a more flexible telework policy in November, but Shonfield said the dispute speaks to a broader issue: that officials are trying to "check boxes" in their return-to-office push without taking the time to understand the needs of their employees.

The EEOC case isn’t the only dispute between labor and federal agency heads over telework policies, and in a workforce that is more heavily unionized than the private sector, that could spell further trouble for the federal return-to-office push.

The federal government has faced consistent calls from office owners and local officials, especially those in D.C., to come up with a re-entry plan for the more than 2 million federal workers across the country.

But the unions representing federal workers have been clear as negotiations over re-entry plans continue that the old expectations about the federal workforce’s office presence will need to be replaced with a new reality: Telework will be a much bigger part of workers’ lives going forward.