By Erica C. Barnett
Members of the PROTEC17 union, including King County employees, held a demonstration in the lobby of King County’s Chinook building on Tuesday to protest King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s three-day-a-week return to office (RTO) mandate, which county employees have called punitive, expensive, and counterproductive.
Carrying signs with slogans such as “Communities not cubicles,” “King County is Bigger than Seattle,” and—memorably—”I don’t have a desk,” the staffers showed up with a giant “blank check representing the expense King County will incur to rent private office space so that employees, including many who were hired as fully remote workers, will have a place to sit downtown.
A staffer for Zahilay showed up in the lobby to accept the check and said she would make sure he gets it.
The county gave up much of its office space during the pandemic and agreed to allow many employees to work from home indefinitely under an agreement called “Green Where You Work.” Now, many county employees don’t have desks to “return” to as part of the “return to office” plan—a misnomer for county employees who were hired over the past six years and have never had a physical office downtown.
David Dahl, a capital projects manager for the Department of Natural Resources and Parks, was hired as a remote worker for a job that takes him to sites across King County. Living in Seattle, he said, might make it relatively easy for him to come downtown to meet the three-day mandate, but for many of his coworkers, the extra trip would add hours of unnecessary commute time to jobs they could previously do from the part of the county where they lived.
“We have a lot of people who have projects in the south end and live in Auburn or Kent or Tacoma, and they can easily get to those projects in a very short amount of time,” Dahl said, “whereas if they have to come into an office and then go back to a park site, that’s a ton of driving to do something that should be pretty simple.”
King County is much larger than the city of Seattle, where many workers also chafed at return-to-office mandates. The county covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many staffers live far away from Seattle, in areas where housing is more affordable.
Moving more than 1,000 employees into “a space with maybe 80 desks” would be impossible, Dahl said, and the new spaces the county has come up with at the King Street Center aren’t up to ergonomic standards. “It frankly should be the bare minimum that if you’re asking someone to work in an office, you should provide them an ergonomic place to sit and to do their work,” Dahl said.
Another DNRP employee, Brad Moore, said requiring county employees to travel to downtown Seattle for work would lead an “extremely high and unknown cost” for office space “that we feel could go towards much better things—for example, the public service that we’re all supposed to be providing.”
Moore, who lives in Shoreline with his extended family and was hired as a fully remote staffer, said the mandate will add a one-way transit commute of between 45 minutes and an hour to every work day. That will make it harder for Moore to help take care of kids in the family and help his wife, who has mobility issues, get to work.
But Moore added that the situation is much worse for some of his coworkers, who live in places like Everett and “are being told that they have to come into the office two or three days a week. I mean, in the morning, it could take two hours,” Moore said.
Yay! More traffic and crowded busses!!!!/snatk
After reading some other articles about this topic, this article completely misses the point.
Sure, those County employees are unhappy about being made to come back into the office to do a job that they have been doing remotely for over 5-years – who wouldn’t be? The King County Exec even published metrics back in 2021 which showed that remote work was more efficient, productive, and a huge cost saving to the County. The main point that those protestors were trying to make, which this article completely omits, is the fact that there is no budget for this return to office (RTO) mandate, the County Exec is deficit spending with zero budget transparency.
Currently, there is a $5.4 million-dollar supplemental budget in front of the County Counsil that is related to RTO, but it doesn’t list any details about what it will pay for. Add this $5.4M to $100+ million that the County has and will need to spend to complete the RTO mandate, and you’ll have taxpayers who will no longer bemoan the protestors commutes and will instead be up in arms over the 10’s of millions of dollars that Girmay is adding to his current $150 million deficit for 2026.
I would say that the protest was an attempt to raise awareness to the taxpayers that there is reckless County spending going on. The feds are cutting programs, and instead of the local government stepping up and help cover the loss, like hiring more doctors & nurses for public health or more deputies to help with crime, Girmay is spending millions of dollars just so he show that the offices are filled, which will justify the spending $3.5 Billion dollars to move County services to the SODO.
Question to the folks who are complaining about this protest… Would you rather work with the protesters to stop RTO, something that doesn’t personally affect any of you, or have your taxes jacked up to cover the Billions of dollars that will be spent if we don’t do something to stop it now?
Choice: Support the protest or Pay higher taxes?
Boeing workers living in Seattle regularly make a 45 minute commute and some do it very early in the morning. Why should king county employees be any different. 45 minutes commute is very normal in many places in the PNW and other states. It’s normal to have more than one hour commute as well. We are told everyday by our king county and city govts that no cars are needed and transit and light rail will transport us everywhere. So tell the protec17 delicate flowers to get on that transit to king street station and get back to work!
The two primary issues I see is that (1) many employees were hired as fully remote workers, apparently on the premise that they’d never be required to commute to a physical office, and (2) the King County office does not have nearly enough desks for the employees it’s forcing to return to the office.
So I can get a fully remote King County job and move to Texas? And the US Courts have been plenty clear that employers cannot dictate where employees live. Employees need to come into the office and be happy that AI hasn’t replaced them (yet).
This article completely misses the point.
Sure, County employees are unhappy about being made to come back into the office to do a job that they have been doing remotely for over 5-years – who wouldn’t be? The King County Exec even published metrics back in 2021 which showed that remote work was more efficient, productive, and a huge cost saving to the County. The main point that the protest was trying to make, which those articles completely omit, is the fact that there is no budget for this return to office (RTO) mandate, the County Exec is deficit spending with zero budget transparency.
Currently, there is a $5.4 million-dollar supplemental budget in front of the County Counsil that is related to RTO, but it doesn’t list any details about what it will pay for. Add this $5.4M to $100+ million that the County has and will need to spend to complete the RTO mandate, and you’ll have taxpayers who will no longer bemoan the protestors commutes and will instead be up in arms over the 10’s of millions of dollars that Girmay is adding to his current $150 million deficit for 2026. If Girmay was true to his own campaign promises about establishing budget transparency, we would see that the $150M deficit is largely due to the high cost of HIS RTO.
The protest was an attempt to raise awareness to the taxpayers that there is reckless County spending going on. The feds are cutting programs, and instead of the local government stepping up and help cover the loss, like hiring more doctors & nurses for public health or more deputies to help with crime, Girmay is spending millions of dollars just so he show that the offices are filled, which will justify the spending $3.5 Billion dollars to move County services to SODO.
Question to the folks who are complaining about this protest… Would you rather work with the protesters to stop RTO, something that doesn’t personally affect any of you, or have your taxes jacked up to cover the Billions of dollars that will be spent if we don’t do something to stop it now?
Choice: Support the protest or Pay higher taxes?
For the person who commented below. You cannot live in another state and work for King County. You have to live in King County or the surrounding area.
Pretty sickening that County employees don’t care about the convenience of their employers— the citizens who pay. It’s why I now vote against EVERY tax that’s on the ballot. People who work for the citizens should be visible in government buildings.
Pretty sickening that you can’t be bothered to comprehend the article before commenting. The whole point is NOT spending $20 million on unnecessary offices in Downtown Seattle when the county is so much more than one city.
People who work for the citizens should, and want, to be visible in the communities they serve. Shoreline. Auburn. Black Diamond. Issaquah.
Customer facing roles are already in office. This is largely administrative work that doesn’t face the public but keeps things operating in the back end of things. Employees that would be visible are already visible. Also, the buildings are full. A major issue is that there isn’t enough space for everyone to return to office.
It’s also about having so many fuckin managers and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing because they have 0 training as managers or leaders and are simply a menace to everyone around them. These spineless fools can’t advise this Exec that his “policies” are impetuous and extremely wasteful and inefficient. Government acting stupid as usual. What a shit show.
Even 5 days a week RTO will not prevent the deflating of the local office real estate market, but landlords love a government handout in the form of bloated lease agreements and parking garage fees.