The return-to-work edict that rocked the tech industry in the waning days of Covid appears headed to the federal workforce.
Several years after Elon Musk faced off, and fired, thousands of then-Twitter and Tesla employees when some didn’t return to the office daily, President-elect Donald Trump said he would reverse a Biden administration agreement that allows thousands of government employees to continue remote work for four more years.
“It’s ridiculous,” Trump said of the agreement former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley signed with the American Federation of Government Employees that extends tele-commuting protections through 2029.
“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed, and somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that, so that for five years people don’t have to come back into the office,” Trump said in a press conference Monday. “They just signed this thing. So it was, like, a gift to a union, and we are going to obviously be in court to stop it.”
AFGE National President Everett Kelley, whose organization represents more than 800,000 workers in nearly every agency of the federal and D.C. governments across 900 local unions, vowed to fight any effort to force workers back into the office. “Collective bargaining agreements entered into by the federal government are binding and enforceable under the law,” he said in a statement late Monday. “We trust the incoming administration will abide by their obligations to honor lawful union contracts. If they fail to do so, we will be prepared to enforce our rights.”
When Musk issued his edict in June 2022 to return to the office or resign, few other tech executives had adopted such a get-tough stance with workers. But they soon followed his lead with mandatory days in the office as well as job cuts. Fast forward to 2024, and with Musk as a close confidante of Trump, the incoming administration is following a similar script, labor experts warned.
Indeed, Vivek Ramaswamy, who with Musk is tasked to lead the Department of Government Efficiency to slash costs, told commentator Tucker Carlson after Trump’s election victory that he believed ending remote work would result in mass resignations.
“Just tell them they have to come back five days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” Ramaswamy said, predicting the move would lead to a “25% thinning out of the federal bureaucracy right there.”
Trump has not been totally anti-union since winning the election Nov. 5 and earning a second term. He supports the dockworkers union in its fight against automation and artificial intelligence (AI) before their contract expires Jan. 15 at Eastern and Gulf Coast ports.
“I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it,” Trump boasted on social media last week. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen. Foreign companies have made a fortune in the U.S. by giving them access to our markets. They shouldn’t be looking for every last penny knowing how many families are hurt.”
The dispute centers on whether ports can install automated gates, cranes, container-moving trucks, and other forms of automation that could make it faster to unload and load ships — a practice that union reps said would lead to fewer jobs and lower wages.
An interesting wrinkle in all of this is the rise of agentic AI, virtual assistants that can do the work of humans in a limited capacity. A race among tech giants to create, as Salesforce Inc. CEO Marc Benioff puts it “digital labor,” could have long-term impact on employees in every industry, as AI agents become available next year and beyond.
AI agents are already being used within Salesforce on its website to answer questions, and the company intends to hire 2,000 people to sell AI products. Salesforce said the second-generation of its Agentforce technology that builds and operates AI agents will be available to customers in February 2025.
“We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions that we’ve opened up,” Benioff said at a press conference Tuesday. “It’s amazing.”
“What is happening is humans and agents are working together to be more productive… I have humans and robots working for me… It is fantastical,” Benioff said. “It is not some fantasy. It is happening right now.”
We are now managing “digital labor” at Salesforce, Benioff said after getting a ride to the press conference in a driverless Waymo vehicle. “Robots are physical manifestations of assistants,” he said. “We have crossed the bridge to digital labor” — which he pegged as a muli-trillion-dollar business.
