Telework Improvements Act of 2010

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts for yielding, but I particularly thank him for his leadership on many issues in our subcommittee, not the least of which is this issue which he has shepherded to the floor so rapidly. And I certainly want to thank Mr. Sarbanes, add my kudos to those he's already heard from the leadership, what he has shown when he was a member of our subcommittee.

Mr. Speaker, this bill does nothing more than give us a presumption in favor of teleworking, and I believe that's the most important thing the bill does. You have heard we have been doing something called teleworking for decades, but that was whatever agency chose to move forward, whatever employees chose to participate.

I can't imagine what the ranking member is talking about when he says millions of dollars this is going to cost the Federal Government. Mr. Wolf, from his side, essentially rebutted that by getting up and talking about how much money it saved and citing examples.

Let me cite an example of something that is almost intuitive. I had occasion to speak to a practitioner, small practitioner, and he was glowing about how his practice has, in fact, developed and expanded. He didn't have to have an office anymore. He has a tiny hole on Tenth Street, and he's got about 15 lawyers working out of their homes.

In a real sense, the Federal Government is behind. There is no case to be made that when you allow people to work at home, you somehow are costing the government more money. Perhaps it costs a few dollars in administrative costs, transaction costs to set up the system, but anybody from the private sector hearing a Federal official get up and say, ``Oh, we're going to teleworking and boy is that going to cost us an arm and a leg'' will scratch his head and say, ``What is he talking about? Don't they know this is one of the first and most important things the private sector has done, invested money in doing, precisely to save money?'' They look at the bottom line. That's the conclusion they reached long before today.

When I speak of the presumption in favor of telework, notice that an agency has a 20 percent goal every 2 weeks of doing telework. We wouldn't have set that goal if they were already doing it. And the fact that you have to do it gives us a some uniformity across the government, and with the appropriate exceptions allows many, many workers, many, many employees to buy into what has now become essentially a workforce practice everywhere with a workforce as large as ours.

The bill, it's very careful. Managers are going to have to be trained. Many are old-school managers. They do not know perhaps as well do I feel instinctively as at home with employees under their supervision who telework. They're going to have to learn how it's done. And importantly, teleworking, as opposed to coming in, does not affect your job performance evaluation. So people are not going to have to think, if I'm in the boss's face for 8 or 9 hours a day, I've got to do better than this mother who is at home and producing as much work as I do.

Continuitive operations has been talked about here.

Post 9/11, the closest thing we have even had to continuity of operations is the kind of teleworking that goes on anyway in the Federal Government. Everybody in the Federal Government at certain levels does teleworking. They take their work home. Employees have been voting with their feet. Managers have been allowing them to vote with their feet and take the work home.

The flexibility, we cannot say enough about the flexibility. We're in an era where fathers and mothers feel responsibility for their children and where, because they are adept at technology, they are able to get as much done and more done. They're doing it at home rather than spending what in this region could easily be an hour or so back and forth each way.

Everybody teleworked in the snowstorm. There weren't a lot of people just sitting at home. We are doing it anyway. We are just not doing it systematically. We are doing it episodically. Doing it that way, we are, in fact, wasting money. Let's, in fact, save money by making sure that as many as are capable are doing what they can given the new technology.

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