RTO Now Scheduled for July 1, 2026
| Executive Order n-22-25 issued in March 2025, directed all State employees to return to in person work four days per week. The authority of the Governor to issue the directive has not been subject to legal challenge. However, the obligation to satisfy bargaining requirements and the societal benefits of eliminating most remote work was the subject of much debate. Some of the public safety units, like Unit 7, were less impacted as a large percentage of the unit was obligated to perform full in-person work, such as State Park Rangers, CDFW Wardens, DSH and DDS Police Officers, CHP Public Safety Dispatchers, DSH and State Parks Com Operators, and DMV Licensing Registration Examiners.
During bargaining for the recent side letter there was no indication that the Administration was intent on backing away from the RTO and the CSLEA Negotiations Team focused on the best means of mitigating the salary savings sought to be achieved by the State budget. The June 24,2025 side letter was agreed to with that focus in mind. When the Administration began agreeing to postpone the RTO effective date by a year, CSLEA communicated with CalHR and advised that if the postponement was extended to a large percentage of the State workforce, CSLEA would expect the same courtesy to be extended to Unit 7 employees. When the agreement with SEIU was announced yesterday, CSLEA again reached out to CalHR and indicated that the parties needed to address the inequity that the other agreements had created. Today, CSLEA and CalHR signed off the on the agreement which does postpone the RTO for eligible Unit 7 employees to revert to pre-Executive Order practices for a period of 1 year. |
