Republicans to pass bill in House to end telework for federal employees | Hacker News Reader

Republicans to pass bill in House to end telework for federal employees

wusa9.com

114 pointsbelltaco203 comments

It has zero chance of passing the Senate or getting signed into law. All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker.

The federal government encourages remote working, and has for many years. Why? Because the D.C. Beltway is a congested clusterf#!$, and keeping people off the roads who don't absolutely need to be makes the commute better for everyone.

Yep.

Better for car pollution, better for urban house prices, better for the cost of gas, better for families/kids, and better for rural communities (as people move out of cities, and take their relatively high salaries/disposable income with them).

It does cause a short term shift as downtown support businesses (e.g. coffee shops, food, etc) have to move closer to where people live. But that is largely a return to what was normal 50 years ago anyway.

But what about the team leader/manager's egos though?

Ah yes. That is the one benefit of the SHOW UP act- it does help the ego of managers.

>> it does help the ego of managers.

Fix:: ... the ego of BAD managers

I read some studies from a decade before COVID about remote work, and the upshot was that teams under previously under-performing managers indeed performed worse, but the previously higher-performing teams performed better.

Makes sense because bad managers manage to the signs of work, not work itself - it the but in the chair, not talking to someone else, etc., whereas the good managers manage to their targets and DGAF about the signs.

Send the poor manager's teams remote, and now they not only lack direction on real goals, but now they're also free of being hounded. Send the top managers' teams remote, and they have the same guidance, but less time and effort squandered commuting, less office interruptions, etc, and they improve.

Considering the studies and recent experience, I'd almost consider it a test of a manager's skill - if they cannot manage a remote team productively, they cannot manage a local one.

(Of course meanwhile, the right wing has gone fully into abusive leader attitude over any facts, and so squanders Congress' time with nonsense like this. Ugh)

(Edit: typo)

Good point, discouraging micromanaging and flaunting power is another benefit they didn't list

Worse for rural house prices though, right?

There's a lot of rural out there..

remote work is great but moving to a rural area or suburb is not better for the environment

Wasn't something that was claimed. Reducing driving in better for the environment.

Is that as cut and dry? Me living in a suburb is only "far away" if I have to commute somewhere far away daily.

But if I barely drive ever, and work entirely remote, is it so bad to live in a suburb? Genuinely wondering.

It’s not so bad if you are in fact walking most places and spending less time in a car. True it’s better than commuting somewhere far, but if you compare to living without a car in an urban core, it’s unlikely your footprint is smaller. Especially if you now live in a 3,500 square foot detached single story home that consumes a lot of heating energy, whereas in a city you’d have say 1,500 square feet with two shared walls and a shared ceiling/floor (basically you have a larger footprint based on insulation and exposed surface area).

The problem is most US towns and suburbs are not set up to be core walkable, dense places, where you don’t even need a car to get home. There are exceptions (I can think of some Hudson Valley towns on train stations, where their core has mixed use multi-story attached housing), but that’s not the norm and is generally discouraged via zoning.

Totally true. And as I think about this more, I'm not thinking enough about other impacts of that sprawl: Sure, I'm not driving as much, but that's because I'm getting a lot of things delivered to me, so SOMEONE is driving around a lot on my behalf (and I'm having to pay for it too).

Although with package deliveries, the impact is amortized by all the packages so the impact is probably less than if I had driven to the store, this isn't true of grocery and food deliveries. Those are about as inefficient as would be if I did that driving myself.

The approach of thinking about suburbs/city/etc will all have to account for the new hybrid lifestyle of remote work now – where people are living in remote areas but still not driving that much either.

Goods have to be shipped farther to reach you. You have to drive more than you might if you lived in a dense city (or dense town, but the US doesn't really have such a thing—hell we barely even have dense cities, really) even without the commute. You require far more installed and maintained pavement to maintain your quality of life. Utility runs are longer, so, more ongoing maintenance costs, which means more fuel use and more use of materials (so, also more fuel, ultimately). And so on.

Less-dense housing strongly tends to be less-green than denser housing, commute or no commute. The differences are extreme enough that yeah, it's pretty close to being that cut and dry.

It depends. Most people commuting to the office aren't living in a high-density downtown, anyways - they are trading a suburban home in the outskirts of the metro for a suburban home further out in the metro. The carbon footprint of the home is similar, the carbon footprint of their car will probably go down, as they only need to drive to the store/school/for social visits, as opposed to that, plus to work.

Noting that I fully support remote work...

Your last point does have a pretty big caveat, in that widespread strict residential zoning outright prohibits almost every kind of useful support business from setting up shop close enough to where many people live (that is, in the suburbs).

The answer to this, of course, is "so let's get rid of that hopelessly strict zoning, which is bad for a host of other reasons, too", not "so remote work is still the problem".

The most pressing problem with WFH is national security work, which requires government employees to come on site to work in secure facilities. Think CIA analysts in charge of producing reports on Russian troop movements based on signal intercepts and satellite imagery. IMO these positions should pay more than private sector equivalents (if they exist) and cover all commuting costs, but I don't know to what extent these perks are within the discretion of agencies or Congress.

This will never, ever happen. The salary scale for federal national security jobs are set by Congress.

those jobs were never wfh to begin with.

I think it's pitting worker vs worker. The "base" perceives govt workers as different from themselves. Divide and conquer.

Bingo. Federal employees are part of the 'deep state' at worst, and bureaucratic bloat at best. They are part of the 'other' to the republican base.

My experience in flyover republican country is that anything that makes a government agency worse, or makes a government worker less happy is good, because it can help bolster the private industry alternative (but complaining about the private alternatives, or wait times at government buildings is perfectly okay).

> My experience in flyover republican country is that anything that makes a government agency worse, or makes a government worker less happy is good, because it can help bolster the private industry alternative

And that's at best! For many, the cruelty of making their perceived opponent less happy (without any benefit to oneself) is sufficient motivation for them to support policy. Policy as a tool to "hurt people"[1].

1: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...

The better solution would be to locate government agencies in red states so they are staffed with representative employees who are at least theoretically sympathetic to their values. Those agencies would cease to be a perennial target for sabotage because no one wants to legislate away X jobs from their state. I would go so far as to allow any federal employee to be allowed to legally work in any State … which feels quite American to me. After all, why should any State or district be elevated above its peers in regards to governance of the whole?

Some of this is already done. For one thing, it's a way to spread funding around. I have a friend who was a higher-up at a Federal agency that had its offices in Ohio. There are state colleges and universities all over the place, and public school teachers are government employees. Hospitals get a lot of public funding. And of course, military facilities.

Possibly part of the envy is the disparity in wage visibility. Nobody knows how much people make in the private sector, whereas government salaries are a matter of public record, and can seem high relative to a sub-living-wage job, while also having "cadillac" benefits, reasonable job security, and comfortable working conditions.

I've read (and probably seen) that there are large regions of the Midwest where the only towns with any appreciable prosperity either have a college or a hospital, or both.

Ironic - since the house only works 146 days per year - so either gets paid to work half the year - or is doing a lot of remote work...

Yes, they're doing a lot of remote-ish work; they go home to their districts. Each has offices (usually several) where they can meet with constituents; it's often the best way to get weird issues with dense organizations like the IRS or Medicare resolved.

You have to understand that is different. It's not emir work but rather getting in touch with their constituents.

Sorry if /s and sorry if not. They do have special work which by definition is in two locations.

Even worse, many of them don't even show up to vote during their limited days anyway[0]

[0]https://www.propublica.org/article/the-dog-ate-my-vote-how-c...

> The federal government encourages remote working, and has for many years

In the D.C. area, that's true. When we were moved out of the area, more than five years ago, one of the first things we were told was that we would not be able to telework as often as we had. When the pandemic it, we went to essentially full-time telework; but, we've been back in the office three or four days a week for a year and a half.

To their voters, they are showing contempt towards federal government employers who are all in their deluded minds lazy because they don't waste time in traffic.

> reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker

Blue-collar workers without the option of working remote may perceive working for home differently than we do. Not saying it's close to correct. Just that the politics of this bill make sense.

That logic suggests that blue-collar workers have contempt for anyone that isn't a blue-collar worker. Is there any evidence to support that?

There is no such "contempt". You're misunderstanding the world view of middle-America.

Their motivations, however misplaced and due to misunderstandings, are about fairness, justice and functioning government. The simple truth is that, to many Americans, the idea of "working from home" means "not really working".

They believe that people in the office will do real work, whereas those same people at home won't. It's a wrong and harmful worldview, but it's not malicious or coming from a place of contempt. A solid "never attribute to malice ..." moment.

At a certain point, someone being willfully ignorant crosses into malice. We live in a world with the internet and a flight to whatever US city you want for $500. If you aren't willing to learn about the world, that's on you. If you aren't able to conceive of the idea that people in different situations might do things different to you, you aren't "ignorant" or "stupid", you are a child who hasn't developed one of the basic parts of your brain.

> We live in a world with the internet and a flight to whatever US city you want for $500. If you aren't willing to learn about the world, that's on you.

This is an ironically contemptuous view. One, five hundred dollars isn’t nothing. Two, that doesn’t include lodging, meals, et cetera, all of which make visiting a city prohibitively expensive for many American families.

Replace $500 and travel expenses with broadband internet and websites hosting text/audio/images/video content where one can learn about the world.

> broadband internet and websites hosting text/audio/images/video content where one can learn about the world

This rarely breeds empathy the way travel (or fiction) does.

They receive their overly-negative views of other Americans from media they choose to consume. They could just as easily consume media that presents urban life in a more positive sense, and swear off media that makes a specific point of painting it in a negative way.

It doesn't have to cost anything to learn. One just has to stop deliberately choosing to learn falsehoods.

Ding ding. Oil field workers in North Dakota can’t work remotely; and knowledge workers who can overwhelmingly vote democrat.

And of course, because those oil field workers can't do it, we should make the knowledge worker's lives worse.

Wait no, we shouldn't do that because it's childish and stupid.

Or save a step and don’t hire them to begin with.

It also reduces the amount of commercial office space GSA has to lease/manage.

> All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker.

I disagree, they're playing into their base well from a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality perspective.

Much of their base associates remote working with pandemic measures, which they believe were unnecessary and exaggerated. They associate the types of jobs that can be done remotely as jobs belonging to "coastal elites"/liberal tech workers/pampered college grads/government employees who belong to the swamp/etc. Those exist in contrast to the perceived base of "real" workers, whose jobs are likely physical and can't be done remotely, and who feel strongly about pandemic mitigations. Their response to workers who are hesitant to work in-person is that "the pandemic is over, it's time to go back to work", and workers who want to remain remote are painted as lazy, insubordinate and entitled parasites.

In effect, this bill is hurting the "right" people and there are plenty of constituents who want to use the legal system to do just that: stick it to the people they don't like. Taking away privileges from government employees does exactly that.

This makes a lot more sense. Whenever you have to choose between Theory A: the other side is evil / hateful and Theory B: the other side is optimizing their self-interest (in this case getting elected by their base), Theory B seems to be the more correct and useful one.

False dichotomy. Why not both?

> reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker.

I disagree...this bill is hurting the "right" people and there are plenty of constituents who want to use the legal system to do just that: stick it to the people they don't like.

This reads to me more like an elaboration on the above rather than a disagreement with it. After all, the "right people" being hurt are, in fact, American workers.

My interpretation is that their base will not perceive this as contempt for American workers, but as a boon for "real" workers who don't want to support the laziness of entitled workers who want to work from home. This can be perceived as pro-worker from that perspective.

The base doesn't consider those people "True" americans and don't think they deserve rights.

The base doesn’t consider anybody thinking differently from them as a “true” American and as such are undeserving of rights. Frankly, I’m getting really sick and tired of these people.

Yep, same idea behind many of the tax code changes (SALT deduction), or immigration rhetoric and posture.

It's fine to hurt people, so long as we're hurting the right people.

> crabs-in-a-bucket mentality perspective

Ref:

> Crab mentality, also known as crab theory,[1][2] crabs in a bucket (also barrel, basket, or pot) mentality, or the crab-bucket effect, is a way of thinking best described by the phrase "if I can't have it, neither can you".[3]

> The metaphor is derived from anecdotal claims about the behavior of crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape,[4] the claim is its efforts will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise.[5][6][7]

> The analogous theory in human behavior is that members of a group will attempt to reduce the self-confidence of any member who achieves success beyond the others, out of envy, jealousy, resentment, spite, conspiracy, or competitive feelings, to halt their progress.[8][9][10][11] The same claims about behaviour are embodied in the phrase tall poppy syndrome.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

From the §See also:

> He observed a self-interested, family-centric society, which sacrificed the public good for the sake of nepotism and the immediate family. As an American, Banfield was witnessing what was to become infamous as the Southern Italian Mafias and a self-centered clan-system promoting the well-being of their inner group at the expense of the other ones. Banfield postulated that the backwardness of such a society could be explained "largely but not entirely" by "the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family."[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_...

> All it does is reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker.

Is this surprising? Seems completely on brand.

Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker

The American government worker in particular. They've spent decades repeating Reagan's line: “The top 9 most terrifying words in the English Language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Government workers are the enemy, and they want to ensure that they're maximally ineffective so that they can remain the enemy.

Republicans never seem to pass up an opportunity to shit on employees. I can’t think of a single piece of legislation they’ve supported in the past 20 years to advance the lives/working conditions of workers.

We're getting into U.S. politics here, but it's kind of a meme...

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2233325-the-simpsons

I have not seen that one. It’s funny. Thanks for sharing it!

That is funny though under Biden the dems did manage to pass some significant bills in 2022. But that's worth noticing only because the meme is so on point.

I'm interested in why the signs say "inside"

Those conventions are held indoors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMRmuyy9f_w&t=30s

Yeah, but you don't typically need to explain that on a sign.

I dunno, looks a lot like good cop-bad cop tag team to me.

They both do harm to the American worker by supporting different aspects of corporate interests. In the end they are both unfriendly to the American worker. Bona fide support to the American worker by the Dems ended some time back in the 80's when they saw the windfall Repubs were getting from corporate. I know it hangs on like a cheap suit that the Dems are unequivocally in support of labor as Bernie used to be in the 80s but it isn't so any more.

Yes, both are “bad” but one party is much worse. I don’t vote since in my view neither party supports workers but I’m not under a delusion that both are equally bad.

Personally, I think things must get much worse in America before things can get better.

Is that why only Democrat led states have higher minimum wages, non compete bans, paid parental leave, pay transparency, higher unemployment benefits, and other worker friendly policies?

I cannot remember the last time a Republican led state passed worker friendly legislation.

That's the "good cop" play. In the meantime, things that would have allowed wages and salaries to keep up with inflation, have been ignored in favor of international trade agreements, outsourcing and importation of cheap labor. It's not that the above have no place in an economy, they do, but they need to be measured and they need to ensure the benefit is to the American worker, not American corps or foreign labor. Give me Bernie Sanders of the 1980s, I'll take the deal.

Did Democrats also just shit on railroad employees?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_la...

I wonder if the generalized statement is that politicians with investments and beholden to lobbyists never pass up opportunities (but i don't disagree with your sentiment).

Well, loosely speaking:

Democrats sometimes shit on employees but do support some measures to help workers. Republicans never support measures to help workers.

The republicans do support measures to help workers if it helps the employer find more workers.

It's a capitalist/socialist mantra to get everyone working and punish those who don't work.

The act of working is not what helps people live a better life. The act of working in humane conditions for human wages and benefits does. Paraphrasing Mencken: A Republican is someone with the haunting fear that a poor person somewhere is benefiting “unjustly”.

It is projection 100%. After all they are the Gaslight Obstruct and Project party.

I doubt any policies are fundamentally for better working conditions. The models of capitalism and socialism do not support this.

OSHA was set up to ensure better working conditions. Regulations regarding wage theft, mandatory paid time off, limit to the number of hours one can work in a week, etc. are all made for better working conditions. You appear to be know very little about the history of labor laws and their purpose.

Yes, both US parties are right wing.

The only difference today is that the Democrats might feign alliance with unions on occasion.

I feel like they did but TBF they wouldn't have had the votes without some unpleasant compromises, and some compromise was better than no agreement at all.

And the good news is they were only a few votes short, which means the dems in general were on labor's side.

Let's hope (and I say this as an employer) we get further advancements in workers' rights soon. Things are way out of whack.

It's arguable we would be in a better place if democrats didn't compromise and take that deal. Maybe our economy coming to a screeching halt for a bit is what it takes to show idiots that we should be supporting workers who make our insane GDP possible, instead of barely keeping up the status quo that does not benefit those rail workers.

Making the economy come to a screeching halt is what the debt ceiling morons want to do. There would be tons of collateral damage with either case, most of which would fall on the poorest people the most (e.g. sudden spike in food or fuel costs)

Yes

Efficiency and productivity raise standards of living. There are no perpetual motion machines or free lunches.

Nominally this is what is being aimed for. Only nominally though as others have pointed out. In reality probably mostly politically motivated pandering and punishment like most partisan activity.

I don’t know if you use “efficiency” and “productivity” in the economic sense but I don’t think this is correct. There are examples where efficiency and productivity have degraded standards of living and there examples where it has enhanced standards of living.

The distribution of resources is grossly unfair and that some get to “enjoy life” whilst a great many others toil in unfair conditions is a great injustice.

Yep life is grossly unfair. Bureaucratic self preserving orgs don't appear to be doing that much to help. Maybe strong AI will do it who knows.

In answer to your question "what have Republicans ever done to help the working man?" the answer is "Kept what little wealth they have from being taken in taxation and squandered with little to show for it". But they haven't done that great of a job on this either. But nominally they claim to be trying.

There's another possibility other than sheer malevolence here, which is that the smarter folks in the GOP recognize that telework presents a threat to their gerrymandering strategies. Republicans do best when non-GOP voters are packed into urban areas. Teleworking means that you can keep your fancy city job but move out to the country, where you are going to start purpling areas that the Republicans would prefer remained red.

To be clear, I'm sure that for most Republicans, it really is about contempt for ordinary workers. But I do believe that WFH is going to have a measurable impact on the political landscape, and not one in favor of the GOP.

Obviously this is just a showy stake in the ground, but I was struck by this juxtaposition:

> The bill would require that within 30 days of passing, every agency returns to pre-pandemic arrangements. ... The bill would also require federal agencies to complete and submit to Congress studies outlining how pandemic-era telework impacted their performance.

A legit process would be to do the studies first (not to mention surveying what has worked and not worked in the private sector), do some experiments, etc. This seems like a really good thing to direct the DoL to do: do some research and surveys, commission (fund) some external research projects, and then do some experiments. I'd really support that.

We are trying some small experiments internally to try to blend the best of remote and in person. For example trying to record & transcribe in person meetings just as is done with Zoom meetings, and publishing them all internally. (So far the company is so small that it hasn't mattered much, but...)

> A legit process would be to do the studies first (not to mention surveying what has worked and not worked in the private sector), do some experiments, etc.

This is exactly right and what representatives interested in good governance would sponsor. Unfortunately we put the wrong people in charge for that. (I guess, thankfully, they're barely holding things together given they couldn't even elect a speaker without trying 15 times, lol.)

> The bill would require that within 30 days of passing, every agency returns to pre-pandemic arrangements

One thing that doesn't appear to have been considered is that even pre-pandemic, many government agencies already had fairly extensive telework programs.

The wording, likely unwittingly, supports this, not forcing everyone into an office but “returns to pre pandemic arrangements”. So forest rangers and those who’d been working from home can keep on doing what they do.

But what are “pre pandemic arrangements” anyway? Refund any raises? Force people who resigned or died to return? Keep working on completed projects?

The studies (hilarious when I assume the point of the bill is to increase efficiency—but here's a bunch of politically-motivated busy work!) are just fishing for things that can be cherry-picked for other anti-remote-work initiatives of all sorts. Making federal agencies run the studies saves conservative think-tanks and business associations from having to do as much of that work themselves. It's "free" (except to the taxpayer).

Another reason not to work for the government. Even if it doesn't pass, just considering a bill like this is odd. I would hate to be at a mercy of politicians when private sector pays better.

When I was doing my CS degree, I went to a job fair for the feds. During a presentation they were making a student asked, "are you still drug testing programmers?", instant chuckles all around. The presenter said they are pretty strict and you have to be drug free 12 months prior to submitting your application. I talked to multiple people who attended and the sentiment was "yeah, I'm not interested".

It is so weird to me to give up talent because they smoke pot. I don't use any recreational drugs myself but so many of my college buds used variety of drugs. Some of them were exceptional team mates.

>I would hate to be at a mercy of politicians..

Being in private industry won't shield you.

Over the past decade or so non-legislative OSHA rulings have completely annihilated business who manufactures small cranes to the favor of anyone who manufactures hydraulic equivalents.

Remember all those weird conversion van/truck things, aftermarket sleepers and other "not quite a full fledged semi truck sleeper" stuff that was it's whole little industry until the 90s? DOT rule re-interpretation of a rule related to off-duty time killed all that.

EPA's, DEA's and ATF's capriciousness is well known...

I'm not sure I have any idea what you're talking about, and I remember the 90s. Do you have a more concrete example, e.g. a picture of these things?

https://cdn1.mecum.com/auctions/ch1015/ch1015-223836/images/...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/ce/ba/6eceba50ee4286808fa1...

https://i.redd.it/zgj5g0d0pb221.jpg

They were the economically obvious solution for uses where a single day trip is beyond the limit of one day's worth of DOT working hours, you don't have enough cargo to justify running semi trucks and you're doing it often enough that dicking around finding motels is a waste of time and money. If you got "fresh maine seafood" in NYC in the 80s it was probably delivered by a 20ft light box truck with those sort of sleeping quarters.

All that went away after the DOT decided that sleeping in anything other than a purpose built sleeping quarters could still satisfy the off duty requirements (I forget the exact verbiage). IMO that's how it always should have been, still everyone who made their bucks building those things, and a heck of a lot of motels that catered to commercial drivers, got screwed overnight.

Your private sector company might also one day be subject to the whims of a boss who bans remote work.

For sure, but I'm always looking and upskilling. I wont be concerned about losing my pension.

Remember, the current governing party is ideally interested in a dysfunctional government as it buys into their belief that "big government is bad"

The current governing party is not the Republicans, which control only the House while Democrats control the Senate and Presidency.

And, as expected, only the House is stupidly dysfunctional. It's almost like voting for a party that tells you government can't do anything gets you a government that can't do anything

Given the article was focused on a House bill, my intention was to refer to the majority party of the house. I realize that wasn’t specific.

Their efforts worked then.

Reps, for various reasons, want as few people working for the gov as possible. By starving the pipeline, they also accomplish that goal.

> Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems (SHOW UP)

Someone should pass a bill banning these cutesy bill names. Do it like Canada and just number the damn things.

I can't stand these as well.

I wonder if the Supreme Court has ever used one of these dumb names when attempting to determine the "original intention" of a law. For example, it seems like the name of Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" demonstrates that the law's purpose is to suppress free speech rather than to "protect the children".

No, they should stay the way they are. The cutesy names always betray the real intent behind the legislation.

Canada makes it harder to see through the bullshit.

Sometimes. Other times the cutesy name is used to conceal the intent, like the PATRIOT act.

Mmm, but a signal is a signal, even if it's a duplicitous one.

That was the point I was trying to make-- whatever the name is, assume the intent is the opposite because it's political suicide to be on record decrying the ENDRACISM or CAREBEAR acts. It's statecraft, and obvious to anybody with a brain.

Naming everything "HB-4739-2B" would make the process more opaque, so only those directly involved have any clue what's going on.

There should have at least some oversight.

Remember the "Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act"

which actually:

"hampered the DEA's ability to seize suspicious shipments of opioids" within the context of the opioid epidemic"?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensuring_Patient_Access_and_Ef...

This is some 1984 naming right here.

They have numbers but they also have descriptive names, like "An Act to amend the Customs Act and the Preclearance Act, 2016" and "An Act to amend the Criminal Code (disclosure of information by jurors)"

There's a very large part of me that thinks that people who got through the pandemic and still can't form an opinion of remote work more nuanced than the one this bill's name implies are telling on themselves.

Ask the special interest groups that have infiltrated state and federal legislatures

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...

They are numbered, once they come up for a vote (if you click through to https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/SHOWU... , you'll see that there's a blank for the number—the filename suggests this is HR 139-1). But you can't stop people from referring to numbered things by their cutesy names.

It does look to be HR 139, although official text of that bill is not yet present: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/139/....

What I like, the bill proposes both a solution to unproductivity (back to office), while also seeking to study the loss of productivity from remote work. A lot of "we're fixing it and then after the fact we'll tell you how expensive this was". Just overall seems mean spirited.

I wouldn't mind seeing the study be done thpugh. WFH is a difficult thing to measure. Would be a case of having to pay attention who is "paying" for that study to be done. Overall the great WFH experiment is interesting to say the least.

When a bill passes, its opponents should get to choose the name.

LOL they'd all get named like "stupid bill for jerks #17"

The mere existence of a cutesy name for a bill forces people to refer to it in a way that is implicitly favorable to that bill. It forces people--especially the media--to keep repeating what is essentially a marketing slogan each time they discuss the bill, even when discussing it unfavorably.

Discussing bills using their numbers would be best, but here's an alternative in case Americans are too attached to cutesy bill names. How about having a law that allows the continuing use of cutesy names, but allows a bill's opponents to come up with a different official name for the bill within a reasonable time frame? The media would be encouraged to refer to the bill using both names, until it would ideally become customary to do so for every bill. This opposing name would provide a quick, easily-digestible counter-narrative for people who hear about the bill, especially for those who might not dig deeper to find out what the bill is about and what effects it might actually have.

For this bill in particular, the opposition could come up with something that spells "COMMUTING HELL", "BUTTS IN SEATS", "FEDERAL BRAIN DRAIN", or something similarly discouraging.

A lot of federal agencies would melt down if they halted remote work. The campuses are already underprovisioned for existing staff, half the time workers show up they can't even find a parking space, and this is with large numbers of them working remotely.

This reminds me of the big show the GOP made of halting hiring for federal employees a few years back. In reality, it made zero difference in federal staffing levels, it merely moved the headcount to contractors which cost taxpayers dramatically more in payroll expenses.

I'm not sure that was an unintended consequences. More money for the contractor companies.

The GOP intention is to make as much government work done by contractors as possible, because it allows more public funds to go directly to crony capitalists, makes the government more expensive, and makes the government worse at it's job. These are all goals of the current republican party.

I know many federal agencies have been getting some great candidates due to their remote friendly work policies. I’ve heard it from several high level friends at different agencies.

The biggest problem I’ve heard of is some of the old guard management who don’t get how to manage remote employees and are focused on the awareness of the activities of their employees instead of the agencies goals and outcomes — which is kind of what this bill represents.

There are federal agencies that “get it” and are really embracing their new reality. I think “operation overlord” bills like this really could hurt Federal recruiting work, as witnessed by some of the comments already here on HN about government jobs. Even introducing this bill is doing damage to government recruiting, and it’s a shame.

New management skills are required to run remote friendly organizations, and flexible work is clearly a if not the future of work. The old 20th century “here’s how much you have to suffer to make a living” models are going out the window, and it’s time to embrace the new culture including exploring and expanding new ways to measure true productivity, which ultimately lies at the heart of this debate.

I think this bill hurting the image of the federal government was its intended effect.

This seems... peculiar. "We will do this completely pointless thing which no-one particularly wants, and then the Senate will block us anyway! Somehow, this will make the voters like us."

Is there a big voting bloc who particularly appreciates this sort of time-wasting?

It's called following through with campaign promises. I know it's scary. People voted for the people introducing this law, and those people want to see an attempt to get it passed. It's not the houses fault they don't control the senate. That's how things are supposed to work.

It's disappointing that the house republicans don't have a better legislative agenda to spend their political capital on. So far they seem to be prioritizing bills that won't make it into law (like this bill, and the irs related bill), fixing problems that seem to only exist in the minds of their riled up base.

Well as of 2020, the republican party had no stated agenda apart from "get Trump re-elected". They also don't WANT to have an agenda, because 1) the US isn't actually as poor off as Fox News says so they don't really have to do anything if they want the US to keep being okay for well off white folk, and 2) because many of their constituents have bought so into "Gubermint bad" that they actively ask their politicians to do less work. Many constituents saw not electing a house speaker as a good thing, since it completely obstructed the government's ability to do almost anything.

How many Representatives mentioned this as a priority while campaigning, and what proportion of America's population do they represent?

There was a... campaign promise to bring an un-passable bill on how the federal government should run its HR? Really? By the party? Really?

(Also I assume this would meet at least some _internal_ resistance; I can't see hardcore libertarians being particularly onboard with the idea of the legislature micromanaging the federal government...)

The same people who vote for these reps. You can’t fix willful ignorance, you can only wait for the electorate composition to change. You are not going to convince someone tribal to suddenly approach policy problems with a logical, data driven approach. Their feelings, to them, are as good as facts.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gi...

If you’re waiting for the electoral composition to change you’ve got a long wait. A decade after democrats declared permanent victory based on “demographic change” the GOP just won the House popular vote, and had its strongest year with minorities in decades. The only thing that saved democrats from a whopping was a one-time boost from Roe being overturned.

> If you’re waiting for the electoral composition to change you’ve got a long wait.

1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die every year (one every 20 seconds), ~3.6 million every two year election cycle (per the CDC), voters who tilt conservative (per Pew Research). States turning blue will get there eventually, and aggregate political leanings will tilt as millennials and younger have less kids or no kids and drop religion. Would I like change to happen faster? Certainly; being held hostage politically at the national level by a minority party with no real policy to speak of is unpleasant (especially the policy weaponized to purposefully harm), but as a scholar, I have learned sometimes time is your adversary, sometimes your ally. Change happens slowly, and then all of a sudden.

If this enumeration seems crude, I’m unsure how else an engineer or systems analyst would approach such a problem. It’s a system, so you must think in terms of systems.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/the-changing...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-mille...

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...

https://www.sociologicalscience.com/download/volume%201/octo...

https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767...

The GOP just won 3 million more votes than democrats in the most recent election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re.... It’s a mistake to treat the presidential presidential popular vote as a measure of party strength. The GOP is structurally incentivized to sacrifice the popular vote for the farthest right candidate who can win the electoral college. That does not mean the party as a whole cannot command a majority. It has won the Congressional popular vote in 3 of the last 5 House elections.

Old people die as time marches on, but young people become old people. The 18-29 demographic voted for Obama by 34 points in 2008. 14 years later, almost that same cohort (now 30-44) voted democrat by just 7 points. Declining religiosity could change things, but not necessarily in predictable ways. For example decreasing religiosity gave rise to Trump and “barstool conservatives.”

Increasing childlessness in theory helps democrats—unmarried women are their strongest base after black people: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/01/17/.... But it also makes for an unwieldy coalition, because the other pillars of the party are minorities, who typically are parents and have kids. As childless people move the party culturally to the left, that strains the relationship with the rest of the base. Like, the best marketing you could give me for persuading my immigrant parents to vote Republican would be to explain to them how important childless people are to the Democratic Party.

Indeed, democrats are in a fundamentally precarious situation. Their coalition is a minority of the dominant group, plus a majority of minorities. They can only win elections if those minorities view politics through the lens of disenfranchised outsiders. The problem is that the biggest share of those minorities, Asians and Latinos, are rapidly assimilating into the mainstream, socially and economically. The last time that happened, with Irish and Italian voters, you got the Reagan wave and three straight Republican landslides, followed by a massive retooling of the Democratic Party. And yes, that change happened “slowly, then all of the sudden.”

> The only thing that saved democrats from a whopping was a one-time boost from Roe being overturned.

Might not have been a one-time boost: I've wondered whether the Dems didn't intentionally not try to pass a national abortion-rights bill during the recent lame-duck session of Congress, precisely to keep Dobbs alive as a voter-turnout motivator for 2024. The added benefit: Fixing the Electoral Count Act was by far the highest priority.

Actually, yes, there seems to be. The Republican political playbook seems to be mostly getting their based riled up about meaningless culture war nonsense. Here they can present themselves as fighting to get lazy liberal remote government workers back to the office rather than wasting tax money at home. It fits right into their style.

This is true, but let's not pretend the Democrats don't do the same thing. It may not be "culture war" stuff per se that they put forth knowingly without the votes to pass, but they use this tactic as well.

Putting your opponent on the record as against something is a strategy, and a perfectly valid one. Whether you out them on the record over culture war stuff, things your base cares about, or better, things their base cares about, is what makes it good strategy or not. (Not that I'm exactly impressed by the strategic success of Democrats)

That would be great, but that's not what this tactic does. You can't put your "opponent" on record when there's not an election, and even when an election is happening, typically at least one of the candidates is not already in the legislature.

This is just to show off for the people at home. Nothing more, nothing less.

It is culture war, but it strikes me as denialism to call it meaningless. There is a meaningful difference between knowledge work industries, which tend to lean strongly Democrat, and agricultural or extraction industries that lean strongly Republican. It’s not “meaningless” for a political party to underscore these differences. That’s how political a works: do stuff for your coalition that’s bad for the other side’s coalition.

>That’s how political a works: do stuff for your coalition that’s bad for the other side’s coalition.

So typical for conservatives to see things like this. No, the job of politics is not to hurt the other team.

No, that’s how every politician sees things. If you think this is only done by conservatives, you have some fundamental blind spot about things done by liberals which are explicitly designed to hurt the other team. Until you learn to understand the conservatives, you’ll forever be mystified why the partisanship in this country grows and why compromise is becoming harder and harder to attain.

Like what? Name some. What things are done by liberals just to spite Republicans?

Assault weapon bans, for example. They do absolutely nothing to reduce gun violence, and they only serve to annoy law abiding gun owners and enthusiasts. Laws focusing on handguns would have made some sense, as most crime is indeed committed with handguns, but the suggestion that banning pistol grips in rifles does anything other than annoy and spite people is preposterous.

This certainly doesn’t appear to be designed to spite Republicans. It appears to be a legitimate attempt to reduce gun violence (even if you don’t believe it will be effective), which is a serious problem in the US.

Contrast that with the topic of the article at hand, which is a solution for a non-problem and serves no purpose.

> Contrast that with the topic of the article at hand, which is a solution for a non-problem and serves no purpose.

See, the Republicans can say the exact same thing about this as above: “the work from home ban is not meant to spite anyone: it is a legitimate attempt to increase the low productivity of federal employees, regardless of whether you, as an opponent, don’t believe it will be effective”.

You exhibit a typical liberal blind spot of “everything we do is for the noble purpose, and if it doesn’t achieve the stated goal, well, too bad, it was a good will attempt, whereas all our opponents do is to oppress and spite their opponents, and their reasons are purely pretextual”. This is wrong and false.

I can give you more example of liberals doing pointless, spiteful policies, but I suspect you’ll just maintain that these are just good will attempts, despite the available evidence. If you cannot recognize that knowingly instituting and maintaining laws that clearly and obviously do not do anything for the expressly stated goal, but instead attack constitutional rights of the opponents, I have zero hope of achieving any sort of shared compromise and understanding.

> That’s how political a works: do stuff for your coalition that’s bad for the other side’s coalition.

I wonder is this a specifically American thing, or a general feature of two-party systems. Many (most?) democratic countries don't have a well-defined concept of two sides. Here, for instance, that framing would make no sense; the current ruling coalition is two centre-right parties who historically dislike each other and have somewhat different constituencies, plus a centre-left party. In a few years, there'll be another government, which is quite likely to contain some, but not all of the current component parties. Try two-sides-ing that...

Yes, this will get fawning coverage on a cable news network, and people who previously had no opinion on remote work will heartily support their team's efforts to stop rewarding unproductive laziness.

Yes. There's definitely political actors out there who seem to think that the whole point of being in office is to virtue-signal & grandstand to voters that their chosen fringe elements of society are being actively courted, listened to, and having their wishes acted out in the public domain.

It's also why we have hyper-partisan politics, partisan versions of "news" and so on.

Washington warned us against political parties and charlatans. We've ignored him.

The bill itself is interesting. It opens with the absurd 30 day requirement, but then has some sensible language about (among other things) a) understanding the impact of remote work on cost and mission and b) defines criteria for the expansion of remote work, including better service to the mission, reducing cost , increased dispersion of workers throughout the country, etc.

That said, pulling the emergency brake on remote work before doing any studying makes no sense to me.

they have also advocated for neoliberalism for decades (especially on the job market), only to want to ban a perk that other companies offer.

this is what makes no sense, when you try to believe what they say.

A bit of a tangent, but I find the use of the "tele" prefix for words like "telework", "telehealth", etc. to sound very outdated. Haven't we settled on "remote work"?

I work for the federal government and we were "reminded" a couple of months ago that "telework" and "remote work" are not the same. If you telework, then you have a desk at the office, even if you are sharing it and you are usually expected in the office X days per pay period. Remote work is done from home 100% of the time and you do not have a desk at the work agency's office.

I was disabled 15 months ago and HR would not consider a remote work situation; but, they did approve a request for 100% telework. My cubicle sits there, the monitor and keyboard gathering dust. (I've actually been in the office, twice, for a couple of hours.)

The irony in this is that many of these representatives were elected by rural voters who were promised better broadband access and remote working opportunities.

Maybe we should require that Congresspersons spend five days a week in their offices, doing work and not spending it on fundraising.

First they’d have to stop exempting themselves from all the other labor laws they pass for everyone else…

There is value in members of Congress spending a significant amount of time in their districts, among their constituents.

I'm not suggesting that they're all using that time effectively, but there exists a rational reason why they shouldn't work normal office hours in DC.

But they have offices in those districts they can work at. I didn't say it had to be in DC.

Whats the incentive for anyone to propose this?

Based on the name of the bill it seems it's supposed to target "unproductive" workers.

So republican politicians?

Amusing you're getting downvoted for this, it's the GOP that just took the longest time in over a hundred years to elect a speaker of the house.

Mostly to appeal to blue-collar people by calling federal employees/office workers lazy and saying they aren't doing work cause they're working from home.

I think the GOP hates government employees and wants most of them to "get a real job". Plus, as the party that looks to the past for answers, this seems like a pretty natural thing for them to do.

This also panders to the executive/manager types that value butt-in-seat time over actual work getting done

Did you read the article? They allude to reasons. FedGov owns a lot of space in DC and their presence drives a lot of the city's economy, like staffers stopping at Starbucks, etc. The DC Mayor has been asking for many buildings back to be repurposed for housing or other uses, too.

And there is the perception that remote workers aren't working that hard, so somehow this is the fiscally responsible thing, despite the fact that ditching a lot of overheads could save the gub'mnt tons of money. It's not like the GOP thought they worked that hard to begin with...

Lastly there is the "wag the dog" idea that this generates clicks and controversy while other bills, like those funding the IRS, or those that would improve minimum wage limits, languish quietly.

Also, what's the average age in congress? To paraphrase a 60 year old I know, "this sounds like more Boomer Management".

Who does it benefit?

Gas and Oil.

Landlords.

Who does it hurt (because cruelty is the point)?

Workers.

Political capital, both in the form of publicity and donations.

They're trying to un-do anything pandemic related and they're taking a potshot at government workers while they're at it.

The GOP is pandering to their increasingly working-class base that generally has limited options to work from home and view it as an urban elitist phenomenon.

The GOP is anti anything that might be construed as a COVID-19 mitigation measure.

> Whats the incentive for anyone to propose this?

It's just politicians doing politics. Democrats and Republicans both. This Congressional session is two weeks old, and there have already been 368 bills introduced in the House.

Find your representative and all the junk they're already cosponsoring:

https://www.congress.gov/sponsors-cosponsors/118th-congress/...

The GOP is so nearsighted. It’s almost certainly better for them in the long term for the DC federal workforce to leave the city and inner suburbs and raise their families in the surrounding red and purple areas exurbs. And all of the downsides of that (reduction of economic activity downtown) is going to be felt by democrats.

Might as well pass a free pony for everyone bill. It has no chance of passing the senate.

Isn't this more of a "take away everyone's pony" bill, though?

I hate to be contrarian, but can civil service worker protections coexist with remote work? WFH works well when there is accountability for the quality and quantity of your work (you can be fired for not performing), but with the drawn out disciplinary procedures common in the civil service jobs it's very difficult to keep employees productive.

the party of shitty managers who only feel good when their employees are forced to bow to their pointless wishes in person

The two parties are like a bad and a good cop: they work in tandem to trim your rights, but because they alternate, use different tactics and pretend to disagree with each other, you get the impression that they are in opposition.

This is absolute nonsense. While neither party has a completely clean record, one is profoundly, dramatically, egregiously worse than the other when it comes to our rights.

One party usually protects our rights, but occasionally does stupid things like join the other party post-9/11 in making life worse for all of us.

The other party celebrates their new ability to pass completely meaningless bills like this one to demonstrate how much they hate worker rights, and that is par for the course. 9/11 wasn't an exception for them, the whittling away of our rights is the entire point.

Neither is perfect, but don't pretend for a moment they are the same.

It would be cool to follow through with evidence for this popular but overly simplistic claim.

"Got any evidence?

...

Be a lot cooler if you did."

Because if you openly state that "both sides bad" is a strictly conservative claim, you get downvoted and flagged. But no, HN is soooo liberal.

I feel like we should probably disregard stories about the minority party passing bills that won't pass the other chamber. It's all going to be pointless posturing.

unless I'm missing something this would have to pass the senate too right? is that actually likely (I can't find much actual info on support for this).

pass the senate and be signed by the president (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyeJ55o3El0)

No, it likely won't pass the senate. And get the president to not veto it should it pass the senate. These kinds of bills often get passed just to make a point.

Even when they have little chance of passing. Though control of the government changes all the time so its usefull to keep an eye of whats coming.

Though the "repeal the afordable care act" came close to getting passed after the senate switched.

Ahh... politics... the fine art of scoring points without actually ever accomplishing anything...

The United States governmental structural encourages obstruction. If your whole platform is 'government bad', its incredibly easy to keep the government from functioning.

I don't think the constitutions writers really planned for a mainstream political party becoming anti-democracy and the basic assumption was that people elected to the government would all desire a high-functioning government while disagreeing about what that government should do.

It is difficult to watch from a distance, in a country with a Westminster parliamentary system. (Which has its own problems, to be sure).

At this stage companies forcing people work onsite are the ones that going extinct in the next decade. Hiring from global talent pool is a much better option. Of course the government just like with anything else goes for the worst option. Always, every single time.

This bill only exists because it didn’t go for the worst option on remote work.

I don’t think ending telework is the solution, and that this mostly political posturing, but if’ve interacted with federal/municipal agencies in the past year, it’s crystal clear that these agencies basically took the previous two years off…

I agree 100%. The level of customer service has hit the floor. I'm not sure if it can go any lower.

Some stuff has gotten a LOT better - doing community meetings online has been great for transparency. Some of it though, has gotten a LOT worse - I get the feeling that a lot of journalists haven't been outside for the last 2 years.

Lol, my girlfriend has been doing remote state work for 4 years now. Service levels have gone down because the same X amount of government workers were asked to take care of double the rate of applications and requests because everyone got fucked during the pandemic and needed basic help from the state.

These people are asked to pick up ten "medium" (using Tshirt rules) tickets a day and have a hard, legally mandated cap of each ticket must be actioned by 40ish days.

If you do software development, these people work way harder than you ever have, and get paid $40k a year for doing it.

You know, this seems like the sort of thing that each agency should decide on their own after taking into consideration the actual workflows and requirements of what they do to determine which style of work benefits them the most.

But a bizarre coterie of hyper-nostalgic boomers ramming legislation through is fine too I guess.

Apparently a directive from the very top that requires everyone to do the same thing regardless of circumstances "small government".

Probably the same people that say the bullshit they implement in jira is "agile" and then wonder why their business sucks

Yeah, they must like increasing profits for car manufacturers forcing people to drive, while not improving public transport.

Coming from the party of pro gas and oil, I would expect nothing less.

We're all going to be driving electric soon. Gas and oil are the past.

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