The president of the state employees union accused the Vermont Department for Children and Families of retaliating against her after she spoke out about a new return-to-office policy — retribution that, she said, included secretly filming her during a remote staff meeting.
Aimee Bertrand, the president of the Vermont State Employees’ Association and an employee of the department’s Economic Services Division, raised the allegations Thursday morning during a meeting of the House Committee on Human Services.
“I’ve been a union activist for over 20 years,” Bertrand said in sometimes tearful testimony. “I have suspected being watched, but I have never concretely seen it.”
That is, until now, she said.
The alleged recording took place amid union frustration over the department’s decision last fall to bring some division staffers back to the office after several years in which they had the option of working remotely.
In late October, Bertrand had expressed disappointment about the fact that Commissioner Chris Winters had not addressed the new remote work policy in his weekly email update.
“Your failure to recognize and respond to the fears and concerns of your workforce is disappointing,” Bertrand wrote in an emailed reply to that update — in which she copied the entirety of the department staff.
In her telling, that started a campaign of retaliation from management. The department lowered her score in a performance evaluation and launched an audit of her use of personal medical leave — something Bertrand said she’d never heard of happening before.
Bertrand said she filed an unfair labor practice charge over those actions in March. A week later, she said, she was told that she was under investigation for an alleged breach of confidentiality.
That alleged breach occurred during an Economic Services Division all-staff meeting conducted on Microsoft Teams in November. During that meeting, staffers were required to have their cameras on, Bertrand told lawmakers, and the meetings were supposed to be confidential.
Bertrand said she took the meeting sitting in her kitchen. While there, she said, her partner walked behind her, through the frame of her computer camera, to get a cup of coffee.
During DCF’s investigation, she said, she was shown cellphone photos of a computer screen showing her on camera with her partner walking behind her. Later, she said, she viewed a 10-minute cellphone video from which those photos were drawn. That video was filmed by a DCF manager on their phone and focused on the video stream from Bertrand’s computer camera — essentially, a window into her kitchen.
“It’s so so, so violating,” Bertrand said in an interview Thursday. “I am so creeped out by it.”
Winters, the Department for Children and Families commissioner, said that he was unable to discuss Bertrand’s situation because it is a personnel matter. But he praised the staff of the Economic Services Division, saying in a text message that they do a “tough job under often difficult circumstances.”
Those workers have “been asked to do so much with the GA Housing program that is constantly shifting – with more changes than any other state program,” Winters said, adding that the decision to end remote work for some staffers was not made lightly.
“I’m glad they have a union to represent them and a forum to speak out,” he said.
The investigation ultimately found that the claims of violating confidentiality were not substantiated, Bertrand told legislators Thursday through tears. VTDigger could not confirm the results of the investigation.
Lawmakers in the Human Services Committee room seemed taken aback by Bertrand’s testimony.
“I’m not exactly sure what we can do, but it won’t just stop here,” committee chair Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, said.
