The fight for remote and hybrid work: A year of strength, solidarity; the road ahead

Looking back, there is no doubt that 2025 has been one of the more challenging years in AMAPCEO’s three-decade history. It has been a year in which we faced an employer determined to violate our rights and insult our status as professionals capable of working for Ontario from anywhere. 

But it has also been a year that has united us. In the face of this challenge, our union has demonstrated incredible strength, solidarity, and determination. 

Since the Secretary of Cabinet announced her return to office edict for the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and the province's agencies, boards, and commissions in August:

• Over 6,500 members (and counting!) submitted a new alternative work arrangement request.
• Over 14,000 AMAPCEO members and community members signed our petition letting the Secretary of Cabinet know that remote work works for employees, for the workplace, for taxpayers, and for communities.
• Thousands of members displayed desk signs, wore t-shirts and buttons, and used virtual backgrounds in the workplace to communicate our message loud and clear.
• Approximately 1000 members attended our September All Out for Remote Work! rally and our parallel regional rallies, resulting in hundreds of web articles, radio and television stories, and social media posts about AMAPCEO’s campaign.
• Since August, AMAPCEO has become a regular voice within the media with either myself or rank and file members appearing in countless television, radio, online or print interviews. Watch for more in Toronto Life and Maclean’s in coming weeks.
• AMAPCEO created a dedicated Return to Office Response Team by seconding six experienced activists to support existing Workplace Representatives in the OPS.
• Centrally, AMAPCEO filed several union-wide disputes and unfair labour practice (ULP) charges against the OPS Employer, including:
  • That the Employer violated the collective agreement by not providing us with advance notice of its plan to effectively end remote and hybrid work.
  • That the Secretary of Cabinet’s August return to the office memo and the OPS Employer’s October guidance to managers and employees violate our collective agreement.
  • Challenging the Employer’s policy prohibiting the use of virtual backgrounds, on the grounds that prohibiting this form of expression is a violation of our rights as unionized workers.
  • Challenging the Employer’s unfair and unreasonable delay processing thousands of requests for remote and hybrid work.
  • Several more dispute and ULPs are pending.
• Dozens of members, refusing to wait around or to take the Employer’s silence in response to their AWA request as a definitive answer, have filed individual or group grievances.
• Hundreds of members shared stories on social media of why remote work works for them, and many shared images and accounts of workplaces that don’t. 

Most recently, we walked out of an AMAPCEO-Central Employee Relations Committee meeting and informed the OPS Employer that we would only return to the table when they’re ready to discuss members’ AWA requests in good faith. 

AMAPCEO members have been waiting months to have their AWA request reviewed, with the OPS Employer doing everything they can to avoid reviewing these requests. 

Now the Employer has the gall to blame-shift employees and their unions for the fact that they themselves cannot keep up with the routine business of reviewing an AWA request—something they’ve been doing for 15 years. All while conveniently forgetting that the catalyst for this rise in AWA requests is the government’s demand that public servants return to the office, and the Employer’s own obsequious adherence to those demands. 

AMAPCEO members are merely exercising their rights to formally request the reinstatement of what worked so well for them and their Employer for so many years. If local Directors had been afforded the ability to review AWA requests over the past four months, there would be no backlog. After all, how much time does it take to review a request for working arrangements identical those that were approved across the board over the past three-and-a-half years? 

Meanwhile, AMAPCEO members forced to return to the office are reporting in droves that their workplaces are inconducive to actual work, or do not have enough space for everyone, a problem that will only be exacerbated by the return to five days of in-office work in January. 

While frustrating, we all knew from the beginning that this would not be an easy fight. 

AMAPCEO members have shown that we are strong, united, and determined—and we will be bringing that strength and determination into the new year.

Together, we will continue to do everything in our power to right what is very clearly a deliberate wrong being perpetrated against us.

Over the past few weeks, we have been developing the next phase of our strategy to defend remote and hybrid work. We are exploring all legal avenues to push back on this blatant violation of our collective agreement, including more unfair labour practices complaints and policy disputes, and we will be ramping up our Remote Work Works! campaign.

The OPS Employer and the Secretary of Cabinet think they can wear us out, quiet us down, and make us go away. 

They thought that before. Now they are drowning in AWA requests, negative media attention, and legal challenges.

They underestimated us in back August—and we showed them just how strong we are.

Together, we will show them once again just how wrong they are. 

Stronger together,