{"id":386479,"date":"2026-07-05T00:02:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T00:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/386479\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T00:02:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T00:02:20","slug":"state-workers-face-new-normal-with-four-days-in-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/386479\/","title":{"rendered":"State workers face new normal with four days in office"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seemed as if Gov. Gavin Newsom was going to waffle forever on whether 95,000 state workers should work from their offices four days a week instead of two. His 2025 mandate<\/a> to double office time was stymied when unions quickly negotiated for their members to stay home. Newsom, so it seemed, had set up a never-ending cycle of bargaining.<\/p>\n

But the governor in his final year in office, less beholden to Sacramento interests, decided to stop negotiating away his authority and start acting like a chief executive. Technically, that mandate issued last year took effect Wednesday<\/a>. Thanks to the Fourth of July and floating holidays for state workers, the new routine for many begins Monday.<\/p>\n

This decision doesn\u2019t feel temporary. For state government and downtown Sacramento in particular, a new normal is taking effect. And in the end, this outcome makes sense for state government and the urban core of the state capital.<\/p>\n

Running California’s government as a remote enterprise wasn\u2019t workable in the long run. It was a necessity during COVID but, that was then and this is now. Public agencies doing the public\u2019s business is best carried out in public offices.<\/p>\n

Besides, rarely used government office space is a waste and an economic drag to downtown Sacramento.<\/p>\n

There is no way the vast state bureaucracies in their various downtown Sacramento offices could ever have agreed on how to share less space together as part of a permanent work-from-home strategy. And when the state has abandoned downtown buildings, such as the three near the Capitol envisioned by Sacramento State as an expansion of its downtown footprint, the Legislature hasn\u2019t appropriated<\/a> funding to turn the desire of university leaders into a reality.<\/p>\n

While some state unions are still battling the governor\u2019s decision, their search for a regulatory flaw in Newsom\u2019s action has so far come up empty.<\/p>\n

In a classically California tactic, one union lawsuit alleged that Newsom\u2019s back-to-office mandate had not complied with the state\u2019s premier environmental law.<\/a> It was a legal theory advanced in court by, of all unions, the one representing the attorneys who work for the state.<\/p>\n

Newsom could not issue this executive order, according to the attorneys, without first conducting an exhaustive analysis of its impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act. Commutes generate traffic and emissions. All this should have been calculated, according to the California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment.<\/p>\n

But in Alameda County Superior Court, Judge Rebekah Evanson disagreed<\/a>. The directive to return to the office is a policy, not some project. Even in California, when a governor states a new policy, it does not trigger an environmental review.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the Court acknowledges that the return-to-office policies will likely inconvenience some employees, the Executive Order grants agencies and departments flexibility to address and ameliorate those impacts, so the extent of any inconvenience is uncertain,\u201d Evanson wrote.<\/p>\n

By all accounts, what Newsom is doing is highly debatable. But it is legal.<\/p>\n

It is called work for a reason, after all.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s doubtful that this work-from-home crusade will get much support from the new governor, Sacramentan Xavier Becerra. He has been commuting to one state job or another for much of his adult life. To his great credit, Newsom has settled this issue for his successor.<\/p>\n

Going forward, the unions can better serve their members by making the return-to-work order as workable as possible rather than fighting it. Hopefully there remains plenty of room for flexibility and humanity for hard-working state employees looking for a little leeway.<\/p>\n

There was a time, not that long ago, when getting the okay to work from home a day a week was a huge victory. Yes, the world has changed since then. But to this day, it is not too much to ask of downtown\u2019s largest employer, funded by taxpayers, to have workers on the state payroll show up most of the time.<\/p>\n

This story was originally published July 2, 2026 at 5:00 AM.<\/p>\n

Related Stories from Sacramento Bee<\/p>\n


\n \"Profile
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Tom Philp is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist who returned to The Sacramento Bee in 2023 after working in government for 16 years. Philp had previously written for The Bee from 1991 to 2007. He is a native Californian and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It seemed as if Gov. Gavin Newsom was going to waffle forever on whether 95,000 state workers should…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":386480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[121,123,122],"class_list":["post-386479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}