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The charity I have chosen to highlight this month is Shelter Movers Ottawa, which offers emergency relocation services for adults, dependent children and pets needing to escape from family violence:

https://www.sheltermovers.com/ottawa/

Staffed by concerned volunteers, it devotes only 5% of donations to administration, the rest being allocated to the practical assistance and resources required in the specific situation.

While few families are conflict-free, problems are exacerbated during a pandemic. In the absence of outside diversions and the regular routines of school and work, family members are compelled by circumstances (but not necessarily by choice) to spend more time together.

In addition to donating to Shelter Movers directly, I decided to buy two books to add to my collection of pandemic literature: The Hot Mess That Was 2021; and The Sh*tstorm that was 2020.

Both are by Jon Sinden. If you buy the books directly from the author, a portion of the purchase price go to Shelter Movers. More details here:

https://thehotmessthatwas2021.com/

So much has changed about labour relations since the pandemic forced employers and employees alike to adopt work-from-home as the default arrangement for office workers. Some love the arrangement, some hate it, many more are on the fence or would favour some sort of hybrid arrangement. It would be overwhelming to tackle all the issues at once so in this blog post, I'll restrict myself to the matter of vacation leave.

For starters: If you were an office worker in pre-Covid days, what time did you get to go home on Christmas Eve? How about New Year's Eve?

For most of my working life in the federal public service, our office buildings started emptying out just before noon. Some people brought their children in on those days, so it would have been difficult to work a full day if the children were young. But as this was not entirely official or government-wide policy, there was considerable variation.

I spent most of my career in government libraries. The Library was a common area, at least to employees (its openness to outside visitors varied by Department). So every year, there had to be at least one employee who would stay at least until 2:30 (sometimes later). I think that was mainly to protect our image and forestall the inevitable wisecracks about lazy overpaid fat-cat civil servants, although I can't be absolutely sure.

Quite often, people actually volunteered to be the ones to stay later. It was usually pretty quiet in the afternoon, an ideal time to finish up some of those little tasks and projects we couldn't get to throughout the month of December, because we'd been expected to at least put in an appearance at all kinds of Divisional, Branch and Department-wide social events. Even throughout the morning of December 24, clients would sometimes drop into the library just to read the paper and escape their own office parties!

We also very often had part-timers or contract workers who were paid strictly by the hour and could ill afford the loss of 4 hours' pay. Chatting with the student who was checking in or shelving books or sticking new labels on them was a welcome respite from a week or so of partying, not all of it particularly enjoyable.

As for term and permanent employees, many of us avoided taking December 24 as "annual" leave, the main reason being that we would be debited 8 hours of leave even though most people would be allowed to go home around lunchtime. December 31 was a little different because even though we often got off early, it was nice to get at least a full week's break from the office between Christmas and New Year's, yet only have to use up 3 days' worth of annual leave.

Covid-19 has definitely changed both office culture and labour-management relations.

Happy New Year, everyone.