PROTEC17 reached a settlement agreement with the City of Seattle in September related to a grievance around mandatory in-person office requirements. The agreement permits employees to work four hours in the office – with the remainder of the workday worked remotely – and count it as an “in-office day” for the purposes of meeting the three-day in-office minimum requirement.
PROTEC17 initially filed a grievance on this matter in January, and moved the matter to arbitration (the final step of our grievance procedure) in February. The arbitration hearing was scheduled for Sept. 4, 2025, but we were able to reach a favorable agreement with the City that avoided a tedious arbitration process, where a specific outcome is not guaranteed.
Individual managers now have the flexibility to decide whether employees can satisfy the in-office requirement based on a cumulative total of hours over a week, instead of four hours on three different days. Managers may only require employees to work longer than four hours in-office when circumstances require an employee’s physical presence in the office, or when there is a documented performance issue.
When this language was negotiated in 2023, it was intended to apply to employees who could commute home during their lunch break. It was not intended to create split shifts or to allow commute time to count for work time in these circumstances. A provision in the latest settlement addresses this.
While the settlement does not impact all PROTEC17 members as many jobs require employees to regularly report to the office, it is a significant victory in the defense of our contract language