Miami-Dade County Sheriff Ends Remote Work for Agency

Hundreds of employees at the former Miami-Dade Police Department will soon lose their ability to work from home, as the county’s new sheriff orders them back into the office next month.

The directive by Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz has no impact on deputies whose patrol duties don’t allow for working from home but could mean big changes for some of the roughly 1,000 civilian employees in the 4,500-person Sheriff’s Office.

“Employees must report back to the office full time by February 3, 2025, unless they have an approved reasonable accommodation under the [American Disabilities Act],” Cordero-Stutz wrote in an agency-wide email on Tuesday, her first day as sheriff. “The goal is to call all staff back to the office in order to fully and appropriately assess operational and staffing needs.”

In calling employees back to their desks, Cordero-Stutz said she was breaking with the county government’s “broad” work-from-home policy.

Those county rules, established during the COVID-19 pandemic, allow Miami-Dade employees to work from home with a supervisor’s permission. Cordero-Stutz inherited those rules on Tuesday when she took over the newly formed Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO), which replaced the Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD) under a change mandated by the Florida Constitution.

Voters elected Cordero-Stutz, a Republican veteran of the MDPD command staff, as sheriff in November. Her demand that MDSO workers get back to their desks tracks with a broader push against the work-from-home allowances that swept workplaces in the early weeks of the pandemic and have persisted well past the end of other mitigation efforts.

At the end of 2024, Amazon and AT&T both said they wanted their desk workers back in the office, and JP Morgan is reported to be planning a return to a five-day office week for thousands of finance employees.

In Miami-Dade’s private sector, about one in four workers in the legal, finance and tech industries are working from home, according to 2023 Census data. That’s compared to fewer than one in 10 in the 2019 data.

The industry category for government workers shows a much smaller portion of employees working from home — about 8%. The public sector includes school teachers, police, park workers, garbage pick-up crews and other occupations where working from home isn’t an option.

It’s not known how many county government employees are working from home. The administration of Mayor Daniella Levine Cava did not respond to a request for information on the topic this week. Levine Cava implemented her administration’s work-from-home policy in 2021, saying in a memo that telecommuting and other flexible work options would let Miami-Dade “create a more flexible, positive work environment.”

The Sheriff’s Office also did not provide information on how many MDSO employees are currently allowed to work from home.

In another change Cordero-Stutz announced Tuesday, the Sheriff’s Office will not be honoring the county’s recent expansion of paid leave for new parents.

In November, county commissioners passed legislation sponsored by Commissioner Oliver Gilbert that doubled paid parental leave to 12 weeks, with an employee receiving full pay for six weeks after a birth or adoption and partial pay for the remaining six weeks. That was up from two weeks of full pay and four weeks of partial pay.

In the Tuesday email obtained by the Miami Herald, Cordero-Stutz said she wanted to reevaluate benefits her employees received from the county and would rescind the expanded leave policies. She said MDSO employees would be entitled to the benefits in place before the Gilbert ordinance passed on Nov. 6.

“The MDSO will honor paid parental leave at the prior rates,” Cordero-Stutz wrote, laying out the previous six-week benefit that tapers off at 50% pay in the final two weeks. “I want to reiterate that some of these benefits may be enhanced in the future, but I can’t commit to policies and practices that may not be sustainable for our future.”

______________

Visit miamiherald.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.