Oregon’s state government workforce is undergoing a major long-term shift toward remote work, as a result of changes wrought by the pandemic and the tight national labor market.
The state employs around 40,000 people and nearly 7,700 are now approved to work remotely full-time under a December 2021 policy change.
A much smaller group is even more remote: the nearly 500 Oregon executive branch employees who work out-of-state. They include many senior level employees, and more than 34% of them earn at least $100,000 a year, including some who could clearly do their jobs from outside Oregon such as state Treasury investment officer John Lutkehaus.
But other workers recorded in the state’s human resources system as working remotely outside Oregon seemed to hold positions that would be challenging or impossible to do remotely. In at least some of those cases, that’s because the state’s data is incorrect. An out-of-state remote employee listed in state data as a corrections officer for the Department of Corrections is in fact working as a background investigator in the Recruitment and Backgrounds Unit, according to a spokesperson for the agency.
The Oregonian/OregonLive requested information on Aug. 1 about which state employees were approved to work remotely from other states, and the news organization received the data this week. On Aug. 17, Willamette Week reported that two senior employees at the Oregon Lottery had moved to Texas and Florida, where they can avoid paying Oregon’s income tax except on the days they physically work in the state.
At the Oregon Department of Transportation, a rail compliance inspector on the state’s list of employees approved to work fulltime outside the state “does not currently have a remote working agreement in place,” a spokesperson for that agency said in an email. The transportation spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether the rail inspector was doing that job at the time they were previously approved to work remotely from out-of-state.
Four elevator inspectors and occupational safety specialists at the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services appear to have been misclassified in the state’s human resources system, because they are actually hybrid workers, according to a spokesperson for the agency.
“These employees are in the Portland area on job sites doing workplace safety and health inspections and consultations and in buildings inspecting elevators,” Mark Peterson wrote in an email.
Any state employee who works at a central workplace at least eight times a year is considered hybrid, not remote, under the state policy.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality “did pause some inspections at the very beginning of the pandemic for safety reasons, but we have restarted on our normal schedule, and it is not affected by remote work,” spokesperson Harry Esteve wrote in an emailed response to questions about how employees who handle permits could do so from outside the state. “All of our inspections and field work is moving forward as normal.” Esteve said the state’s list of DEQ employees approved for remote work outside Oregon “includes staff who may have worked out of state on a temporary basis, but are back in state. Others may live across the Columbia River and are technically out of state but it does not affect their work in Oregon.”
Oregon Department of Human Services, which handles a wide variety of assistance programs along with child welfare and is the largest state agency, also has the largest number of employees approved to work remotely out-of-state: 157. Spokesperson Jake Sunderland did not address how any of the specific employees’ job duties can be completed remotely from other states and instead sent a general statement noting that not all jobs require employees to come to the office or visit clients. “Some (child welfare) positions require working in offices or in communities directly with clients and families,” Sunderland wrote. “Other positions are focused on program design, oversight, consultation, policy or training and do not require working directly with individuals and families in the community and can be done remotely.”
Andrea Chiapella, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Administrative Services, said the state government’s remote work policy reflects changes in both public and private employment since the pandemic.
“Initially, the pandemic forced not only Oregon, but the world, to change the way we work,” Chiapella wrote in an email. “As we come out of the pandemic, our top priority remains ensuring that Oregonians are well served. When this can be accomplished, and when the business needs of the agency can be met, we are finding that continuing to offer remote work as an option is an important tool for recruitment and retention — especially as many private and public sector employers have moved rapidly in this direction. Now, offering remote and hybrid work plays an integral role in state government being a competitive employer, both in terms of recruiting a diverse candidate pool and in retaining top talent.”
-- Hillary Borrud; hborrud@oregonian.com; @hborrud
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