(CN) - California's Judicial Council voted Tuesday to allow central office bureaucrats to work at home one day a week. The unanimous vote came over the strong objections of judges deeply involved in the effort to reform the big and powerful bureaucracy atop the state's trial courts.
Judge Charles Wachob, who headed a group of judges that spent a year investigating the Administrative Office of the Courts, said the council was missing the forest for the trees.
"I think it is important to remember for a moment what sort of got this issue here -- because there was a perception of the telecommute policy being either abused or misused or liberally used. It was a headline grabber. And it was not a good headline for the judicial branch," said Wachob.
"Some of the discussion here has focused on the peculiarities or features of the proposed policy as opposed to the underlying focus -- whether or not telecommuting policy advances the mission of the judicial branch and advances the mission of the AOC -- and to that, I haven't heard a very good justification," said the judge.
The options before the council were three: get rid of telecommuting altogether, allow it only under special circumstances, or allow telecommuting one day a week.
In the days leading up to the vote, Judge Maryanne Gilliard from Sacramento said the options before the council were skewed towards a vote for option three. "That option," she said, "gives AOC management carte blanche over telecommuting."
The council voted unanimously for option three on Tuesday afternoon, but said it was a pilot program that would be revisited in a year.
AOC Director Steven Jahr told the council of his conversion on the issue.
"My goal is to err on the side of stringency," said Jahr.
He added that, coming from the trial courts where he worked as a judge in Shasta County in Northern California, he was used to seeing court workers come to court. "My initial surmise is it can't make it more productive," he said, "but degrades the quality of work."
But after conversations with friends in the private sector and some research, Jahr said he changed his mind.
He added that he did not want his words to seem harsh towards the administrative office employees. "What I have said may sound a bit harsh and it may seem perhaps suspicious of our employees," he said. "I don't mean it to seem so."
In the private sector, Yahoo's new president made news last week in reversing that company's permissive use of telecommuting and required all employees to come in to work at Yahoo. Similarly, Google strongly discourages telecommuting.
"It is disappointing, but not surprising," said retired Judge Charles Horan in Los Angeles, "that the Council ignored the arguments of Judge Wachob, Chair of the SEC Committee, who wisely urged the abandonment of AOC telecommuting in light of past abuses, which included an employee telecommuting from Switzerland, and one AOC division with 40% of its staff routinely telecommuting."
"Despite Judge Wachob's correct observation that Judge Jahr failed to convincingly make the case for the need or efficacy of telecommuting by AOC employees," said Horan, "the Council fell into their tried-and-true policy of giving free rein to the AOC."
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