Facing a backlog of school discrimination cases, the U.S. Department of Education has asked hundreds of employees it fired months ago to temporarily return to work.
A Dec. 5 email obtained by USA TODAY shows the agency ordered a significant portion of staffers in the Office for Civil Rights to come back later this month. In the “return to duty” directive, officials acknowledged they’re facing a sizable caseload of civil rights complaints, and they underscored a need to utilize every resource at the government’s disposal to work through them.
The agency said the request applies to roughly 250 workers who’ve been on administrative leave for months amid legal challenges to their March firings. Julie Hartman, the Education Department’s press secretary for legal affairs, stressed there still aren’t any plans to fully rehire those workers permanently.
You don’t get to order people who don’t work for you.
It says they are on administrative leave. So they do technically still work there is some quasi state. I assume the order would force them to come back or quit. Which is probably the point.
You’d be surprised what a severance package can manipulate a laid off employee into doing.
They’ve been out since March.
Either their package was paid or why would you trust them to pay out of they haven’t already.
You do when you have the legitimate monopoly on violence.