blogcutter

As someone who worked for over 33 years as a federal public servant, some of it part-time and most of it as a member of one or other of the two largest public service unions, I have quite a lot to say about the return-to-the-office order that takes effect today.

Some of my union-sibs (I remain a member of PIPSC, in the Retired Members Guild) may take exception to the fact that in my working years, I honestly preferred to go to the office to work. I valued having a clean break between work time and personal or family time. That said, the public service office of the 1970s and that of the 2020s are two very different environments. Technological and social advancements (or regressions, depending on your point of view) have steadily blurred the boundaries between time you can call your own and time on the Government's dime.

Here are some other things I valued as an in-office worker back in the day:

1. I had my own workspace, be it ever so humble. I could personalize it a bit with photos of the family, posters or whatever, as long as they weren't racist, pornographic or overtly political.

2. Someone else was responsible for ordering and providing the necessary equipment, stationery and supplies. Also for vacuuming and cleaning the floors, emptying the wastebaskets, cleaning the toilets and so forth. There was also a cafeteria with reasonable prices and usually acceptable food. If you preferred to brown-bag it, many government workplaces also had a lunchroom or lunch area, with a mini-fridge and microwave oven.

3. Management has adopted the slogan that public service work is a "team sport". I must confess that while I got quite fed up with retreats, "team-building" or "morale-boosting" exercises and such over the course of my career, there were certain features of the social life of the office that I definitely appreciated. Things like going out for lunch together if someone was leaving. The Christmas pot-luck spread, where there was always something suitable for us vegetarians (one of my colleagues used to bring in some wonderful samosas). The annual picnic. These are some of the things I genuinely miss now that I'm retired.

But let's talk just about the work itself. In the olden days, certain times of the year were extremely busy while at other times, the workload was relatively light. If you went in to work during a light workload time, you still got paid, even if you weren't doing your regular work. Most times you could still be productive, though. Maybe starting on a long-postponed project that just wasn't feasible before. Maybe helping another section, where the ebbs and flows of workload were different from yours. Maybe catching up on some professional reading or discussing new ideas with your colleagues.

Seen from a unionist perspective, I wonder if the great strike of 1991 would have been as successful as it was, if everyone had been working from home? And what of the decades-long battle for pay equity?

I do find it interesting that for a change, the back-to-the-office requirements (4 days a week) for the executives are actually more stringent than those for the folks in the trenches (3 days a week). Mind you, they presumably all have nice offices with doors (maybe even windows) and staff they can call on at whatever hour of the day or night. But still ...


I know we can't turn back the clock. Working from home was a public health imperative when the pandemic was at its peak. It remains so for some workers. Even if the Employer generally has the right to dictate conditions of work, Employers also have the obligation of reasonable accommodation of individual employee needs, and of ensuring occupational health and safety requirements are met.

The enforced hybrid work arrangements were imposed in a very ham-fisted manner, whatever our labour laws may be. I'm a big believer in labour-management consultations. The interests of employees and top brass are not always at cross-purposes!

It would seem to me that at the very least, those employees who were happily and successfully working from home 24/7 before the pandemic lockdowns should be allowed to continue to do so. As for the others, who have had over four years to experience the pros and cons of a home office, surely that has to involve a process of consultation and negotiation? The move towards more "flexible" work arrangements actually began several decades ago. But the question that doesn't seem to have been answered satisfactorily as yet is "Flexible for whom?"

I suspect the current Treasury Board president is likely to be a little more reasonable in negotiations than whoever we get after the next election. There's work to be done here, and the sooner the better.

But to end on a somewhat hopeful note, my advice to those still in the workforce would be: Don't despair, fonctionnaires!

https://www.ottawalittletheatre.com/ProductionHistory/PlayProduction.php?productionid=427

For folks on all sides of the "Let's get federal public servants back to the office" debate, here's a wild thought for you: What if we actually made the office an attractive place to work?

I know this may sound ridiculous to outsiders who think public servants are already a bunch of spoilt, idle fat cats with gold-plated pensions and benefits. "What more do they want?" these outsiders ask. "Are we expected to believe they can or will be productive when they're sitting at home?"

Well, that depends. The nature of the work that public servants do is so diverse - just like the Canadian population they serve - that there cannot possibly be a single one-size-fits-all solution. Some work may lend itself well to full-time telecommuting; some may require full-time availability on the employer's premises; some may be more conducive to a hybrid arrangement with a certain percentage of working hours allocated to mandatory in-person meetings and group work, while other time could be organized to suit the individual worker. There are labour issues, there are management issues, and often they operate at cross-purposes. But not always.

Collective bargaining, done right and in good faith on both sides, with dispute mechanisms to resort to if needed, can be a good way to resolve conflicts between employers and employees. But not everything has to be adversarial and I think many people would be pleasantly surprised at the number of areas in which the employer's and employee's visions converge. I'd love to see more labour-management committees, more bipartite and tripartite structures to flesh out matters of mutual concern. Happy employees and valued employees, generally speaking, are productive employees.

As I understand it, the latest order is that beginning January 16, some public servants must start going into the office two or three days per week. There will be a phase-in period lasting until the end of March at which point everyone (all full-time public servants) will be required to work on-site 2 to 3 days a week.

But here's what I don't know:
Will they make a choice between either 2 or 3 days a week? And can they choose WHICH days? Can they choose to work 4 or 5 days in the office if they prefer that kind of arrangement?

Believe it or not, I know plenty of people who actually WANT to work from the office. They want a clear separation between home and work. But if they're going to go in to work each day, they want their own space. None of this "hoteling" and "universal footprint" and having to depersonalize their space. For services that people WANT to get in person - maybe passports, Social Insurance Numbers, income tax matters, some library services, and so forth - I think it makes perfect sense for public servants to be in a central office somewhere.

I honestly believe that public servants used to be valued much more than they are today. I joined the public service in 1976 and retired in 2009 (with a few summer and part-time jobs in the pre-1976 period). The biggest attraction was job security. We were urged to accept any public service position we could get because once inside, we could apply for those types of permanent position we might aspire to. There were also some clear career paths. At university, recruiters appeared on campus every fall and most of us wrote standardized tests as a possible entry point to the Administrative Trainee and the Foreign Service Officer categories. And there were other paths specific to specific majors and specializations. People with degrees could start at specific prescribed salaries, depending on the level of the degree.

Even if you didn't have a degree or a diploma, you had excellent job security as well as a number of other favourable job conditions once you landed a permanent position in the public service. I remember the days when every federal building had its own (price-subsidized) cafeteria. Those days are long gone! We were entitled to severance payments if we opted to leave the public service. We were unionized. We had our own workspace. Many of us, even at relatively low levels, had our own office with a window that opened and a door that closed.

Then they got into the "open office" concept and we became a bewildering maze of impersonal cubicles. Then there was the "universal footprint". Cafeterias were closed or privatized; employees often had to pay if they wanted an on-site fridge or microwave for lunches they brought.

Some of the most egregious recent assaults on public servants have come since I retired: cancellation of severance payments; the incrediblibly awful Phoenix pay system - and more.

I don't regret the career I had, but I'm VERY glad to be retired!

September 2021 marks a number of significant anniversaries and as we head into the Labour Day weekend, I'd like to highlight one in particular: the 30th anniversary of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) general strike.

At that time, I was working part-time at the Labour Canada Library, Place du Portage Phase II in Hull, while also studying part-time towards a Masters in Public Administration from Carleton. As a member of the LS (Library Science) group, I belonged to a PSAC union local, so I was out there on the picket lines and on Parliament Hill. Through sheer numbers, we brought traffic to a virtual standstill in downtown Ottawa and Hull.

I had been dreading those 6:30 AM line-walking shifts as well as the loss of income at a crucial stage of my family- and career-building life. I would end the day feeling physically and emotionally drained. But I was pleasantly surprised by the extent of public support. The Federal Public Service is the region's largest employer, after all. Moreover, a lot of folks were fed up with Mulroney cosying up to Reagan and failing to stand up for Canada's sovereignty and overall best interests in crafting the sweeping Free Trade Agreement.

That's not to say everyone was on our side, of course. The Ottawa Sun totally lacked any understanding of the logistics of labour-management relations, implying that those on the picket line, even the polite ones exercising their legal rights, were a bunch of criminal hoodlums. But here's a fairly middle-of-the-road account from one of Canada's best known news magazines:

https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1991/9/23/saying-no-to-zero

At the international level, however, the Employer managed to earn some pretty strong disapproval from the ILO for disregarding our freedom of association and collective bargaining rights:

http://white.lim.ilo.org/spanish/260ameri/oitreg/activid/proyectos/actrav/sindi/english/casos/can/can199207.html

As was inevitable, we were legislated back to work. We probably made a few token gains in terms of job security. We may even have earned a little grudging respect. But the long-standing pay equity dispute was not settled until eight years later. But enough of that for now.

The organization I am highlighting for this Labour Day weekend edition of Phirst Phriday Philanthropy is the Workers History Museum:

https://workershistorymuseum.ca/

There's a wealth of resources on the site although interestingly enough, I couldn't find anything marking this important anniversary in local, national and even international history. It looks as if the museum also has a physical site downtown on Bank Street and I intend to check that out soonish.

Finally a word about Phirst Phriday Philanthropy, which is the successor to my Philanthropic Phridays. I've been pondering for a while the best way of winding down the weekly series because while the pandemic is not over, I'm moderately optimistic that we're seeing the beginning of a better normal, delta variant notwithstanding.

So effective today, this will be a monthly series, appearing on the first Friday of every month. I'll carry on this way until at least March 2022, the two-year anniversary of the initial lockdown. Then we'll see.

Stay tuned for Phirst Phriday Philanthropy #2 on October 1.

The President of the Treasury Board has promised that under the Liberals, we can look forward to a new golden age for public service workers. For the sake of our children's and grandchildren's future career prospects, I really hope that's true. They have an ambitious agenda ahead of them; on the other hand, many public servants who have survived a decade under the Conservatives are feeling that almost anything would be better than the status quo!

On May 3 2012, I wrote a piece in praise of formal credentials, expressing the view that in the shift towards competency-based human resource regimes, recruiters were placing undue emphasis on the "soft skills" at the expense of professional knowledge and experience. While I still stand by what I wrote nearly four years ago, it has since occurred to me that there are definitely some soft skills or competencies in which the baby boom generation tends to excel.

The first of these is loyalty, both to the organization as a whole and to one's specific department and work unit. When overwhelmed by bureaucratic red tape and the stresses and annoyances of office politics, we could always shrug and say "Oh well - it's all pensionable service!" Even when faced with having to defend a policy that we didn't personally agree with, we would try to reframe things a bit and emphasize the positive aspects. And because there was such a diversity of types of work in the public service, we could always meanwhile start applying for jobs that were more to our liking, or more in synch with our personal values and ideals. Because when we signed up for a public service career in the 1970s, it really did look as if we would be guaranteed a job for life. Maybe not one with a fabulous salary, but certainly a secure one, where our credentials would be recognized and we would get our annual increments, if not promotions, and have a decent pension at the end of it all.

Supplemental to loyalty was discretion. We would generally refrain from making public statements that related to policies or directives that were still in the works, or were seriously at odds with what our political bosses were trying to implement. In return, as long as we were performing our job duties properly and in good faith, we enjoyed a certain immunity from prosecution or the duty to testify in public fora, via the doctrine of ministerial responsibility and deputy ministerial accountability. This was - and, I would argue, had to be - something that came from within. And of course, public servants' freedom to speak out depended on the level and nature of their jobs! I'm not talking about penning a song about the prime minister on your own time while fulfilling your job responsibilities to study migratory bird patterns during working hours. Nor about those who argued - again on their own time - that metrication was a misguided direction for the government to take, even though the performance of their own job was in no way compromised.

Once politicians, political appointees and senior public servants began to chip away at the founding values of the public service - "downsizing" and "rightsizing" those who had been led to believe their jobs were secure, watering down the doctrine of ministerial accountability, eliminating severance pay, trying to eliminate banked sick leave that had already been negotiated at the bargaining table, and so on - then all bets were off. It's something that our new government will definitely need to address if it truly wants this new golden age to come about.

Another area where I believe the boomer generation excels is in terms of patience, analytical skill, and the ability to take the long-term view. The organization I worked at for the last eight years of my public service career was big on management training. To be honest, I don't think in retrospect that it was an ideal environment for me. But I tried to do my best and play the game as I saw it at the time. During a "learning circle", one fellow boomer participant lamented, "Whatever happened to the days when you just came to work and did your job?" She felt that the new recruits were wanting to know right away when they would be promoted or when they'd get to go to a conference or when someone was going to come and ensure their workstation was ergonomically correct or whatever. In short, they seemed to be preoccupied with everything EXCEPT the day-to-day logistics of their work. I guess these newbies were, in a sense, taking a broader view of their work life - it's just that they wanted their personal medium- and long-term goals to be achieved right now, if not yesterday, and there seemed to be no sense of aligning their own goals with those of their work unit!

All of which brings me to another competency that I believe baby-boomers can offer: that of bridging the generation gap. Boomers have been the eager young pups just starting out and they are also finding themselves in an environment where their skill sets and personal values may be seen as quaint or obsolete. Outside of their work environment, they may well be performing sandwich-generation roles as caregivers to aging parents or other elders, while they themselves are dealing with some of the health concerns associated with aging. While every generation may have slightly different priorities and preoccupations, I would suggest that the baby-boom generation often has a lot of practice in mediating between the various age-groups.

So by all means, let's put in place the conditions that will attract young people to the public service. But let's not throw out the baby - or in this case the older generations - with the bathwater. We need a diverse workforce that will represent the range of values and priorities of our national mosaic.

This is Public Service Week, the week when the government highlights all the important work done by federal public servants and tells us how much we are appreciated by offering free burgers and concerts at lunchtime.

So what better way for Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board, to kick off the week than by making his big announcement about gutting public servants' sick leave plans to combat malingering and save the taxpayers (except those who happen also to be public servants) a whole pile of money?

Believe me, I forfeited quite a few days' pay due to illness in my early days in the federal public service, back when I was a "casual", a "summer student", a "co-op student", a "term of less than six months" or a contract employee (and certainly not one of those high-priced consultants making a few thousand dollars per day, either!) Is it too much to ask that, once I've been employed for long enough, I get to accumulate sick-days to insure against financial disaster once I'm plagued with the inevitable physical and mental illnesses that may hit me later in my career? Illnesses, I might add, that may well be partly CAUSED by my work environment?

Luckily, I did not need, in my younger, minimum-wage days to take anywhere near the 12 to 18 days that the average federal public servant allegedly takes per year. By the time I got my first major in-service illness, a nasty bout of pneumonia in 1985, I had enough accumulated paid sick leave to cover the month or so I required off from work. Late in my career, when I developed rheumatoid arthritis, due in part to (or, at the very least AGGRAVATED BY, the stress I was undergoing at work in the wake of perpetual reorganizations and downsizing exercises, I likewise had plenty of sick leave built up, although it was far more difficult to take time off as I felt stretched to the limit as it was.

The federal public service demographic is an aging one as it is, and if the government persists in setting the retirement age ever later, that's only going to intensify over the years. The accumulated knowledge, skills, experience and wisdom of the vast numbers of aging baby boomers - and the knowledge transfer to younger generations - is invaluable to the smooth functioning of the federal public service, as it no doubt is for most other organizations and employers. But older people do tend to have more in the way of chronic health issues and sandwich-generation family care demands. It's not a question of the sick leave and disability plans being unaffordable. Indeed, the Government of Canada cannot afford NOT to provide such benefits.

This announcement follows hard on the heels of another one regarding performance appraisal. The Harper Government seems to believe that performance reviews are a new idea in the public service. On the contrary - all the government departments I worked for during my 33-year career had annual performance appraisals. As for firing public servants due to incompetency or incapacity (not to mention laziness, unethical or criminal behaviour, or other obvious unsuitability) being so rare compared to firing of private sector employees... dare I speculate that part of the reason is that in the public sector, they take the time and energy to select the right people in the first place? Public sector recruitment and hiring is notoriously slow, with lots of hoops for the candidates to jump through. Safeguarding the merit principle, human rights, official languages requirements and representativeness in terms of the population to be served, all take quite the network of time-consuming administrative procedures. But in a free and democratic society, we ignore those procedures at our peril!

And I'm sure we'll hear more announcements over the next few weeks and months attacking the supposedly overly generous salaries, pensions and benefits of our public servants.

Happy Public Service week, everyone!

Oh gosh. I need to go to a:

(a) librarian
(b) archivist
(c) genealogist
(d) website
(e) all of the above

Soon, your only option, if you want some assistance or advice with gathering information, performing research, or even selecting leisure-time reading, may be (d).
That's assuming you have internet at home. If you don't, or if it's not working, you'll have to go somewhere where there IS functional internet. Time was, you could rely on your friendly local public library for that. But now, Industry Canada in its wisdom, has cancelled its Community Access Program, which funded public access internet stations in public libraries across the country. To be sure, some public libraries will still offer the service but if they do, they'll have to review their already-strained budgets to find money that was previously earmarked for something else.

In the federal public service, we hear every day of yet another departmental library closing its doors and laying off its librarians. Librarians are trained to gather and organise information and provide research assistance that is invaluable in supporting informed policy- and decisionmaking. In the public as well as the private sector, that can save time and money, not to mention the reputations of high-powered officials. Then there's the Library and Archives Canada, whose mandate and reach extend far beyond the bounds of the public service. They are cancelling their interlibrary loan service, which will affect ALL kinds of libraries all across the country and to some extent internationally. It will disproportionately affect smaller libraries with more limited staffs and budgets. They have already eliminated the National Archival Development Program and pulled out of the Association of Research Libraries.

There almost seems to be a conspiracy of silence surrounding all the layoffs. On the other hand, if I were having to compete with a dozen former colleagues just to keep my own job, I readily admit that I would be hesitant to stick my neck out and risk offending my prospective managers and employer.

Libraries in schools and postsecondary institutions are feeling the pinch too. Many colleges and universities have converted all or portions of their libraries to a "learning commons" type of environment, consisting mainly of computers and chairs and roving student geeks to assist students and faculty in navigating the cybersphere. While I wouldn't want to turn back the clock to pretechnological days, I AM bothered when I hear that perhaps 75 to 80% of a library's collection (only a minuscule portion of which is available electronically) is stored offsite in relatively inaccessible locations.

This month, the Canadian Association of University Teachers will hold a Librarians Conference in Ottawa. The blurb describes librarianship as "threatened by Wal-Mart style corporate management that cuts costs by deskilling work, outsourcing professional responsibilities, misusing technology and reducing necessary services and positions." It goes on to ask,"How can our community push back against this destructive agenda?"

Well, I'm hoping to find out. I've registered for the conference, which takes place on October 26 and 27.

When I joined the federal public service in the mid-1970s, it was much more credentials-based than it is now. If you had a 3-year general Bachelor's degree, an honours (4-year) degree, a Master's degree-without-thesis or degree-with-thesis, or a PhD, you were guaranteed a specific minimum starting salary. And it was expected that for the first few years at least, you would have a good chance of getting regular raises and promotions based on your increasing value to your employer. Even somewhere around the late 1980s or early 1990s, I recall being asked, when I applied for a competitive process, for "certified copies" of my degrees, a request which even the degree-granting academic institutions were unsure how to handle! (The eventual solution? I was to bring the original degrees in when I came for my interview and someone from Human Resources would photocopy them and attach a note stating that she had seen the originals.)

Nowadays, it seems everyone is into "competencies". Sounds great in theory, right? After all, no one wants incompetent employees, especially when even the competent ones are stretched much too thinly to cover the work that needs to be done.

Parallel to that is the demand for "generic" job descriptions to streamline the recruitment and hiring processes. Again, most people would love to shorten the time required to get qualified staff in place. (Though as an aside which merits a blog entry all on its own,I think it must be said that safeguarding the merit principle takes a certain amount of time and energy. An equitable public service with a composition reflecting that of the country as a whole is a value worth striving to protect. Private sector employers, while they might do well to emulate the public sector in some respects, simply do not face the same constraints.)

The problem is that the skill set of knowledge workers is NOT made up primarily of generic skills, and that's precisely what makes those workers so valuable in the first place.

Faced with demands for "competency-based" recruitment and "generic" job descriptions in order to expedite staffing, overburdened human resources officers are understandably inclined to craft job descriptions based mainly on what we used to call the "soft skills", things like being a team player, having a superior service orientation, having good communication skills, being committed to life-long learning, and so on. Certainly these skills are important. But how do you measure them? And should they be valued at the expense of that body of scarce professional and technical knowledge and expertise that is implied by an advanced degree?

What seems to me to be happening is that the "personal suitability" cluster of attributes, which used to be weighted at about ten or at most fifteen percent of the ultimate hiring decision for a professional employee, is now accorded more like eighty-five or ninety percent weight in the decision. The relative weights of the "hard skills" and "soft skills" have been effectively reversed.

But is that just a question of different needs in today's workplace, I hear you ask?

Well, look at it this way. Supposing doctors were chosen strictly on the basis of their "bedside manner" with no regard to their area of specialization. It's all very well to reduce wait-times, to have doctors who truly listen to what their patients have to say, to make the patient's experience in the doctor's office a little more pleasant. But at the end of the day, if that wonderfully personable, service-oriented doctor lacks the expertise and professional judgement to make a reliable diagnosis and prescribe an appropriate course of treatment, the lives and health of the patients will be needlessly placed in jeopardy.

There is a similar problem with this emphasis on "front-line" services at the expense of "back-room" services. Fact is, front-line service is often merely the tip of the iceberg. The back-room services are the rest of it - or perhaps more accurately, the foundation that keeps the building standing and working the way it should. We've seen a few scandals over mismanagement of medical records and to my mind that can only get worse if we continue to focus only on those activities that are conducted in public areas.

A degree or diploma or certificate is, or ought to be, a shorthand guarantee that a prospective employee has at least a certain minimal set of skills and attributes - a necessary and often sufficient condition for at least an entry-level job in that person's field of expertise. And if you had to make the choice, wouldn't you rather hire people based on what they've demonstrated over a period of years that they are capable of, rather than on their bubbly personality that won you over during an hour-long interview?