California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s green-friendly policies inspired a union to wield the state’s flagship environmental protection law to stop a July deadline for roughly 90,000 state workers to expand in-person work requirements.
The lawsuit has raised eyebrows among scholars in the Golden State, particularly its novel legal theory that Newsom’s requirement that state employees begin working in offices four-days-per-week violates the California Environmental Quality Act. The union representing state attorneys and administrative law judges claims the state failed to assess the environmental impact of putting tens of thousands of additional cars on the road during the morning and evening commutes.
“A workplace that requires people to work in person rather than remotely seems incredibly far from” what that law is intended for, said Catherine Fisk, an employment law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “After the pandemic when lots of workplaces went back to all in person, it never even crossed anyone’s mind that you have to do a CEQA analysis.”
The complaint—filed June 5 by the California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment, also known as CASE—alleges the return-to-office policies violate CEQA because the state failed to analyze environmental impacts from increased commuting by more than 90,000 state workers. The complaint estimates that in one month of remote work, workers saved 1.2 million commute hours and 2 million...
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