Gavin Newsom hurts city of Sacramento by caving on his return-to-work order | Opinion
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order to send state employees back to their offices four days a week starting next month appears to be something he’s willing to bargain away. It’s a terrible way to run the state and continues California’s horrible track record as the worst tenants in downtown Sacramento since the pandemic.
But first, the details of Newsom’s bad deal:
One of the state’s 21 bargaining units emailed its employees Monday that the governor’s order would not apply to them for a full year as part of a tentative bargaining agreement that provides for no across-the-board salary increases in 2026.
The 13,000 engineers, architects and other professionals represented by the Professional Engineers in California Government won’t have to be commuting back to their jobs nearly as often starting next month.
“The Side Letter to PECG’s current 2022-25 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) suspends immediately the Governor’s four day return-to-office executive order for Unit 9 employees until July 1, 2026,” the union’s notice to employees on Monday says. “Again, the Side Letter applies only to Unit 9 members and is in effect now.”
The tentative agreement is available on the web site of the state’s negotiators, the California Department of Human Resources.
It’s telling that Team Newsom made no big splash about this Monday. It was left for the public to find it.
The agreement does include a 3% raise for this year and a 4.5% “special salary adjustment” for 2027. But it was the back-tracking on the governor’s back-to-work order that got top billing in the PECG’s communication.
Of course, the governor could simply rescind the executive order and give all state employees the same deal as the engineers. But then, his negotiating team would lose a key bargaining chip in its talks with employee representatives about wages, benefits and working conditions. Once we’ve started down this rabbit hole, there appears to be no turning back. There will have to be 20 similar agreements with the other 20 bargaining units for California to have a consistent policy on where state employees are supposed to work.
It was perhaps inevitable that this mandate to do the public’s business in public places was going to end up at the bargaining table with representatives of the state’s quarter-million employees. The rank and file want nothing more than to work from home as much as possible. The state is facing billions in red ink as federal spending remains up in the air.
But if the governor’s team plans to bargain away this back-to-work mandate one negotiating unit at a time, that’s an upside-down way to run California government. And it threatens to create a perpetual state of uncertainty over what the state government’s workplace policies actually are.
This hurts the state capital the most.
Sacramento’s downtown is dominated by state and local governments who pay no property taxes. The partially occupied office buildings have stifled a rebound from the COVID crisis. The governor’s decision in March to reoccupy the offices appeared to have resolved the matter once and for all. Now the future of downtown Sacramento is once again a giant question mark.
Newsom is doing Sacramento a horrible disservice. Either this administration has to occupy these buildings or begin to aggressively get rid of them so that the capital can evolve into a far more residential downtown. Right now, downtown Sacramento is stuck with a black hole of empty or near-empty state buildings.
This flip-flopping is the worst scenario of them all.
This story was originally published June 23, 2025 at 4:36 PM with the headline "Gavin Newsom hurts city of Sacramento by caving on his return-to-work order | Opinion."