Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration moved quickly to place California state employees in positions as coronavirus contact tracers after his call for volunteers failed to come up with enough of them.

Too quickly for some workers and their unions.

“Although we’ve been able to provide hundreds of employees to help the state recover, we still need many more,” Cabinet Secretary Ana Matosantos said in a letter to agency secretaries and department directors that was dated Thursday, May 21.

The letter directed the officials to enter employees’ names in a spreadsheet by Monday, May 25, Memorial Day.

The administration is recruiting about 10,000 state and local government workers to call, email and text people who have been in close contact with those who have tested positive for COVID-19 to try to slow and eventually stop the spread of the disease.

Some older employees and those with underlying health conditions at the California State Lottery were interested in volunteering, since the work can be done from home, but never got a chance, said Paulina Vasquez, a district sales representative at the Lottery and an SEIU Local 1000 union steward.

Instead, more than 40 lottery employees received emails telling them they had been selected for contact tracing, according to Vasquez and an email from Lottery Director Alva Johnson.

“You just got a letter out of the blue,” Vasquez said. “It said ‘you’re going to be redirected, more information to come.’ And that was it.”

“The California State Lottery was mission tasked with providing 5 percent of its staff to assist the state in their contact tracing efforts,” lottery spokesman Jorge De La Cruz said in an emailed statement. “The California State Lottery will continue to do our part to help protect public health as we confront the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic.”

Some employees within the Department of Consumer Affairs also received surprise emails notifying them they had been selected for the work, according to emails provided to The Sacramento Bee.

Local 1000 is meeting with the Department of Human Resources over the reassignments, president Yvonne Walker said in a video posted to the union’s website Friday.

“We know there’s going to be instances where people can’t do it for whatever reason and we want to figure that out for folks,” Walker said in the video.

Contact tracing assignments are expected to last six to nine months, and then workers will return to their normal duties without any loss in salary, benefits or service credits, according to a separate question-and-answer form prepared by the departments of Human Resources and Public Health.

Workers will be assigned to local governments for the work, but will be able to telework or work from state offices, according to the guidance.

So far, the state is recruiting only state and local government employees for contact tracing work, not members of the public, said Department of Public Health spokeswoman Ali Bay.

Bay said Tuesday in an email that the state had trained about 950 state and local government employees and another 350 were in the pipeline. Local governments had trained an additional 3,000, Bay said.

The state has the authority to reassign workers in an emergency, she said.

The state has expanded its criteria for who may be assigned contact tracing work, according to Matosantos’ letter. While the state originally sought workers in the classifications of staff services analyst and associate governmental program analyst, it is now including similar workers above those levels, along with managers and supervisors and workers in special fund and fee-supported positions that had been excluded.

The letter cites scientists, engineers and attorneys as examples of those now eligible.

Seeing engineers on the list surprised Ted Toppin, the executive director of Professional Engineers in California Government.

“It would be nice to be noticed or even given a heads up about them offering up your members,” Toppin said.

He said the union supports the state’s contact tracing efforts, but that the union’s workers had very little time to make decisions about a potentially significant change in their work.

This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 6:15 AM with the headline "‘You just got a letter out of the blue’: California state workers surprised by reassignments."