It is a Three Blog Night: Blog One – Remote Work In the Government Contracts World

“The bands now famous name [Three Dog Night] refers to native Australia hunters in the outback  who huddled with their dogs for warmth on the cold nights, with the coldest being a ‘three dog night.’”

--Official website, Three Dog Night:  https://www.threedognight.co/bio#:~:text=The%20band's%20now-famous%20name,a%20“three%20dog%20night”.

One of the burdens of being a regular blogger is that when you go away for summer vacation, the obligation to post a blog remains. To anticipate that need, I have decided to write three related blogs today, and hoard them for future use. This first blog is on remote and telework policies.

Bloomberg reports today that there are several bills pending up on Capitol Hill dealing with the Federal employee telework policies. See Punching In: DOL Targets Enforcement on Restaurants Shorting Pay (bloomberglaw.com).  Bloomberg reports that “Sen. James Lankford’s (R-Okla.) Telework Reform Act (S.3015) would require workers to come into the office at least twice per biweekly pay period, and would increase remote work availability for law enforcement and military spouses who have to move often with their partner.” (Emphasis in original). There is a separate bill introduced by Sen. Gary Peters (D- Mich.) which would require more transparency on the policies. See S. 4043 - Telework Transparency Act of 2024, https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4043. But that legislation has stalled over objections from Sen. Mitt Romney. Romney and Sen Joe Machin, who have jointly introduced other legislation that would cap telework at no more than 40% of the time in a worker’s pay period. See Back to Work Act, Manchin, Romney Introduce Bipartisan Back To Work Act | U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia (senate.gov). Thank you to Bloomberg for summarizing the proposed legislation. Of course, these bills are directed at the Federal work force, and not the contractor work force.

When I teach my virtual Government contracts seminars for Federal Publication, we poll the attendees. It is my unscientific sense, from those polls, that many if not most government contract service jobs which can be performed remotely, are indeed being performed by workers who don’t report to the workplace. Remote work is alive and well among Government service contractors, in particular who aren’t performing services at the Government’s work site.

Here at Abrahams Wolf-Rodda, LLC (“AWR”) we also struggle with remote work issues. I myself am a traditionalist when it comes to work ethic. Accordingly, I viewed the productivity of remote workers with a certain skepticism. Indeed, I continued to report to the office almost every day even during the pandemic. But the AWR staff largely went remote by legal mandate. And eventually we moved to a hybrid schedule. And now we seem to be moving back to more of a remote office place model. Even I am thinking of becoming what my wife calls “bicoastal”, moving to a hybrid model, and eventually maybe an all remote workplace. I have a condo in Seattle where my two kids have relocated. At some point, that likely will become my principal residence. So perhaps the skeptic becomes a convert.

The fact is that in the modern age, the physical office is rapidly becoming obsolete and an unnecessary expense. Like these blogs, AWR exists in the cloud and web. That is where our timekeeping, billing, email and documents are all found. And with the right passwords they are all accessible anywhere.  As for collaboration, that can be done, albeit not as effectively, by MSTeams or Zoom, other software, or at least my colleague Howard Wolf-Rodda so insists. The virtual office is here to stay, and remote work is the natural outgrowth of that technology. As they say, if you can’t beat them, join them.