PSAC Strike 2023
 

Lol...

She had a medical exemption to work from home full time but she managed to make it to the picket line.

Wow! This says it all.

It's quite ironic that the Union is forcing its members to picket in person everyday while they are "fighting" for work from home.

:uhh: It says nothing whatsoever except that she may not be in a privileged enough personal circumstance to afford to take an indefinite number of days off work without strike pay.

Any revelation beyond that speaks more to one's own personal biases, I reckon.

PSAC has an Accommodated Picket Duty option for those with accommodation requirements under the Canadian Human Rights Act. So that probably means the medical exemption from office work was probably something informally arranged with a manager, rather than something where a proper medical assessment was done.

She’s also probably receiving strike pay and her regular salary simultaneously. But yeah tough times.

I'm not sure I understand why that's ironic? Some things can be done remotely while others can't. My regular office work can be easily done from home (better than an office, in fact). Same isn't true of picketing. Picketing and office work are different types of things.

AFAIK the dispute is whether the workers get to decide whether their work can be done from home or not. PSAC is not giving them that agency.

Some logic in this statement. But the picketing is the secondary value of a strike isn't it? I assume withdrawing labor would be the central part of it.

That is incorrect. The main dispute is over wages. TBS wants us to take a pay cut of 5% adjusted for inflation. The secondary dispute about telework is about codifying language around telework so that the employer can't unilaterally change the rules again on us like they did in December.

Since the start of the pandemic, the telework that's been in place has always been limited to positions for which telework was appropriate. For tasks that cannot be done remotely, there has never been telework in place even in March 2020.

Striking employees who don't want to picket can simply choose not to show up. Withdrawing labour is a part of it, raising public awareness and ensuring visibility I would think would be also very important tasks. As is monitoring the use of scab workers.

Not surprised by the very conservative takes on this forum lol. Tories on bikes you lot

I’m fairly disappointed at the crabs in a bucket mentality. Personally I hope they get an above inflation wage boost and reasonable flexibility on WFH. Because that’s what I’d want.

The union says they won't get strike pay in that case. Not surprising lots of younger workers aren't striking.

Didn't I see in the press recently that WFH (full time) is equivalent to a 17% wage hike?

Yes Cannot be done like Airport security of course but there is a lot of work that was done remotely that is probably done better in person. Passports seems to be the obvious answer unless there is another reason the system collapsed?

I think that the whole debate is missing a key data point - where their wages are now - below or above market. If they are already well above market, then I see less of an argument for big increases. If they are at market or below, then the asks are reasonable. I’ve never seen any neutral analysis of where compensation stands, but it probably varies by bargaining unit.

As for work from home, that is being a bit misconstrued. The government isn’t saying that they can’t have flexibility to work from home, just that the employer can’t give up the right to tell its employees where to work. That’s a pretty clear management right, and the union’s ask would be a fundamental re-write of labour law. From a practical perspective, just imagine how much the system would be bogged down by grievances if individual employees could grieve every time the employer told them they needed to come into the office. Not a recipe for a productive workforce. I don’t have sympathy for that ask.

Market rate is impossible to determine for so many of these people.

How much is the team that approved the Covid vaccine before the FDA worth? Should they make half as much as a pharmaceutical lobbyist?

Conversely a government admin assistant has nowhere near as much stress as a private sector "Secretary" does. They almost aren't the same job. Even the assistant to a Deputy Minister I'd argue has less stress than the secretary to the head of sales in typical car dealership.

PSAC doesn’t do this sort of job. Most PSAC categories have fairly clear private sector or municipal/provincial equivalents.

https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-bo...sentation.html

A few exceptions of course.

There may be some jobs that are hard to compare, but I don’t buy that these employees are all so specialized or unique that they can’t be compared with others doing similar jobs. If nothing else, you will have comparables in the provincial public services. (Nor do I buy that every private sector admin assistant has more stress than public sector admins).

There is a whole industry of consultants whose job is to classify jobs based on comparing duties and required skills. A company like Hay has a massive database of classifications and could give you market comparables for every job in these bargaining units.

To be clear, I am not saying they are overpaid compared to the private sector. In my experience, those at the lower levels tend to be paid higher than the private sector, while professionals in the public sector are generally paid less than they would make in the private sector, often by a lot.

I guess I mean government in general but lots of those jobs still hard to compare. What's the fare pay for a lighthouse keeper?

I'm not saying they can't be compared just the work in many cases is so different it's not an easy one to make. I don't think they are dramatically overpaid or we'd have millions trying to get into the Public Service like India. The reverse also doesn't seem the case or there'd be higher turnover.

I think that’s right. Turnover is a relevant data point for sure. If turnover isn’t high, then you are probably in the right ballpark.

It seems to be a maintenance job tasked with maintaining the equipment. I am sure there are lots of private sector equivalents.

https://thespaces.com/fancy-being-a-...nd%20equipment.

Tentative deal for Treasury Board workers
https://workerscantwait.ca/tb-agreement/

So who won?

The peasant public service workers are not informed. Neither are the tax payers. The Union decided the offer is good enough and sent everyone back to work without actually informing them of what they've accepted (or close to accepting) on their behalf.

I'm generally unhappy with PSAC. The time leading up to the strike was all propaganda ("when" we go on strike, not "if members vote to strike", for example), public servants had to jump through a bunch of hoops to vote, they removed on week of voting with little warning (unless you registered for emails, you would not know). Calling the Federal negotiators and Fortier morons and incompetent was not helpful. And saying the Feds don't know how negotiations work when the Feds submitted at least 3 offers, while the Union only budged this week (apparently, and no one is allowed to know by how much), it really rubs me the wrong way.

The 13.5% original ask was relatively reasonable, many other demands are not. It should be up to the employer to decide the work from home or hybrid arraignments, department by department. The Feds' 9% was relatively reasonable as well. Looking forward to hearing what the final offer was.

CRA's ask is not reasonable by any stretch. Feds' shouldn't even bother to respond or negotiate.

If it were up to me, everyone in the public sector, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, police, the army, nurses... would all get inflation, full stop. It's unfair that politicians get to vote on their own salaries, cops always get more than everyone else, while public servants have to fight for inflation.

Deal is finally up. 12.6% over 4 years.

https://psacunion.ca/psac-has-reache...t-pa-sv-tc-and

Plus one time 3.7% making those who went on strike whole and nice bonus for essential workers and scabs.

Sounds like union caved on everything else though allowing appeals and individual circumstances might mean nothing in private sector but be a huge stalling mechanism for public sector workers? I'd guess union had more incentives to make the language stronger than it sounds.

I am surprised PSAC settled the main contract and left CRA. Surely the government can now hunker down and wait them out. They could easily just extend the tax deadline and it seems like people actually "sending out cheques" are deemed essential.

The government’s ‘fair’ offer (that was recommended by the Public Interest Commission) was 1.5% for 2021, 4.5% for 2022, and 3% for 2023. This is what the government and media referred to as 9% over 3 years. If the values were compounded, the total increase over the three years is about 9.25%. There was also a cash ‘signing bonus’ offered to each employee, although I have not seen a value for that.

At that point, the union was asking for 4.5% for each of 2021, 2022, and 2023 for its Treasury Board members. This would total 14.1%, compounded, over the three years.

Apparently, the government increased its wage offer and presented the new numbers as their ‘final’ offer this past week-end. I have not read what the numbers were for the ‘final’ offer, but they would have been a bit better than the ‘fair’ offer.

The final agreement is quite similar to the government’s offer. (Indeed, it might be the ‘final’ offer that was made.) It comes with a 1.5% increase for 2021, 4.75 for 2022, and a 3.5% increase for 2023; for a total compounded increase of 10.1% over those three years. The amount of the ‘signing bonus’ is now given as $2,500, per employee.

Was it worth a 12-day strike to get an additional 0.9% for those three years? I can’t say, but the union, it seems, had to make the number look bigger. Therefore, a fourth year was added in, with a 2.25% increase for 2024. This allowed the union to declare that it negotiated a 12.6% increase.

So, now those Treasury Board employees, whose average salary is $67,300, will receive a cheque for the back-pay up until now, plus their ‘signing bonus’. That will be an average of about $7600 (up to May, 2023) – with about $2,200 going back to the government for income taxes.

Although I feel that it was added just to ‘pad the numbers’, I am glad that an increase for 2024 has been included in the deal. If it had not been, then the negotiations for the next agreement would have had to start right away. This gives a year before things (might) get nasty again. Personally, I think that the government will always prefer to negotiate increases based on PAST inflation numbers, rather than trying to guess what is coming. Based on that, I expect that they will not be truly negotiating the next deal until 2026, when the union gets fed-up again.

Maybe we can finally get an 11.5-12.6% decrease in the number of employees to go along with this raise. I don't dispute a raise was needed.

Its astounding the growth in the number of public sector employees these days.

bUt wHo wIlL dO tHe wOrK?? wE HaD tO tRy SO hArD tO pIvOt tO (WorrKinG) aT hOmE.

Population of the federal public service and Canada
Year Public Service Population Canada Percentage

2010 282,980 33,889,236 0.835014398
2011 282,352 34,230,378 0.824857967
2012 278,092 34,592,779 0.803901878
2013 262,817 34,958,216 0.751803238
2014 257,138 35,323,533 0.727950967
2015 257,034 35,611,271 0.721777103
2016 258,979 35,970,303 0.719980035
2017 262,696 36,398,013 0.721731706
2018 273,571 36,898,431 0.741416349
2019 287,983 37,422,946 0.769535888
2020 300,450 37,986,182 0.790945508
2021 319,601 38,124,373 0.838311492
2022 335,957 38,644,920 0.869343241
11% Decrease 299002 38,644,920 0.773715484
36,955

Gotta cut some of the litany of new programs in order to do that. Also what do you do in Ottawa that you're cheering for our largest industry to get cut?

Also, you can't really discuss the size of the public service without looking at the number of consultants in the shadow public service, which has been ballooning for years. The government is at least talking about reducing consulting expenses, which would have a bigger positive impact on budgets than staff cuts (not to mention the impact on public service morale). If you feel that the public service has a lot of waste, I would love to introduce you to the Deloittes and McKinseys of this world. Having dealt with those types of consultants extensively, I particularly enjoy the idea of paying someone who just left the public service three times as much to provide the same advice, with very little stake in the long-term outcome of what they are advising on.

while I agree the number of PS workers is exuberantly high for no reason our population did grow little under 9 million people, also, Tech has increased, Society has changed, and so did the Bureaucracy that may of comes along with all of the above. Why aren't more systems like Passport Canada automated? Who knows at this point.

Not only that, typically the person just "retired" and is collecting full pension in addition to 2-3x the pay. It's nuts.

Consultants (particularly politically connected consultants) have clearly been misused. But I also don't think it is a question of bureaucrat good, consultant bad.

A consultant, even if they have a higher hourly rate is usually a one off expense. Each new bureaucrat hired is more or less a 5 million dollar lifetime commitment.

I'm... a consultant. lol

I agree the number of consultants HAS ballooned, both consultants retained for one-off projects, and a ridiculous number working 'on contract' on a semi-permanent basis. I suspect the consultants who semi-permanently move in to a desk are not listed in the books in the same way as a full time employee. (I'm not talking about noobs who are 'on contract' and then 'made permanent' I mean consultants who work full time in house, take their $25k/month over 10 months, then leave).

The same has happened at the City of Ottawa, they are full of Colliers employees who have @Ottawa.ca email addresses, and physical desks. Are they actually on the books in the right place, or is the City 'cost cutting' by not having to pay for a retirement fund for Colliers employees?

The problem I'm seeing: Regular employees responsible for the programs I'm consulted on are literal bags of hammers. Speaking to a large group via Teams, it's tough to find a few brain cells to rub together. I do 99% of the work, a single person, and the team of 10 on the other side can't produce anything, don't absorb the information I provide, and the programs and services are delayed, limited in scope to cause additional blowback (and more consulting, year over year, for 10+ years on average), or cancelled altogether.

Its a catch-22 a bit. We need well paid, professional employees in the public service, who specialize in the task. Currently we have low paid pions who move around every 3 years out of boredom (aka 'stress', which is just an existential crisis labelled as stress) and they don't necessarily need prior experience or specialize in a topic, they just need their 'Pion PY3' level to be able to move about at will.

Don't hold back tell us how you really feel.

Highly specialized skills certainly aren't remunerated in the public sphere but then doesn't it make more sense to higher outside specialists for tasks that aren't needed regularly?

I've been at essentially the same type of job, different employers, for about 20 years now. And the older generation of baby boomers largely have retired in that span of time.

At the beginning, I learned a lot from the public service employees in those positions, I would say I learned many things have have really helped me in my career.

Over time, the mentality/policy you've described has completely hollowed out the public service, both federally and municipally. To the point where every specialized task is farmed out, and you need 4 employees and two contractors to replace one good one who retired.

Two of the four employees will be off on stress leave or file a human rights complaint for being asked to perform tasks.

Two will be self-righteous go-getters who have 4 hours of coffee 'knowledge sharing' sessions per day, between truly productive 3 hours of work, or they work in the office from 7:30 - 1:00pm as their 'office day'. They also feel the need to work from 11pm-3am because they didn't work a full day, they do this at their home office which was created to pivot for covid, and send most of their emails at that time, and feel overworked because of it, even though it's still only truly 7 hours of production. But of course none of the production is tracked through any sort of quality time tracking either, so it doesn't really matter. For instance, someone I work closely with at PSPC uses the same time tracking online software that I use. I track every 15 minute increment to be billed to a project, and must reach 90% billing each week, with 10% spent on 'Administration' (usually time to do the timesheet, lol). He puts 100% of his time to administration every week, and the time tracking software is used to just track his vacation time. How can management ever tell if there's any efficiency to what he's doing? For me, if I book 100 hours to a proposal with 5 hours of work in it, I've lost 95 hours of profit. If this happens in government, its just a normal Tuesday and nobody knows about it anyways.

The two contractors are paid too much, and do all the production. I once knew a guy who made $40k quarterly, issuing an update report on a subject. He would travel to Ottawa for two days of meetings on the report (report was kinda long, but didn't much change each quarter). He consulted on many other things as well, all around the world (expert) but owned his own condo in Ottawa for his quarterly meeting. Did he need to be writing that report for the government? Perhaps. Is it crazy and am I jealous? Absolutely.

Lol going off, but yeah when I was at the City in Development Review, my contract was ending and It couldn't get renewed during Steve K's hiring freeze when he became City Manager... So what happened, consultants from WSP and MMM came in 3months at a time picking up the slack because we were so understaffed. They definitely cost the city way more.

I spent 2.5 years consulting for various Federal departments. My consulting consisted of doing the job of various full-time employees who were incapable of producing anything of value.

I'm not painting a broad brush here.. there are a LOT of talented, dedicated, hard working people in the PS.. but I can confirm the only reason I was there was to do the job of FTEs who couldn't do their own job... and I was not alone.

I worked over two years on a 'contract' position for the feds. No benefits, no pension. They just kept extending my contract, never offering me a term position. Same with about 5 other people in my department. I guess this is a cost-cutting measure? Seems really shitty.

When I asked them politely why.. after 2 years of getting extended contracts.. they wouldn't just hire me on? I was sacked.

Harls, that's a common story.

Having said my rant, I will be honest and say that I've considered moving into the public sector. I fear for my sanity and the golden handcuffs and the existential crises that may arise. However as I grow older, I realize with my current RPP I can retire in about 300 years (literally how fast it's growing).

It gets more and more appealing to jump into the golden parachute before it becomes too late. Where else can I work in an office and receive cash for life? Not many places, and nowhere in my field.

There are lots of stories like this but without specifics which understanblly people can't post its' hard to know how widespread it is.

Interesting points but the cash for life thing is nonsense. They save 10% of their salary which is matched. If you save that much you will be better off. The pension only seems excessively generous to people who don't know how to save or invest. Usually both. Middle age public servants are the worst for this thinking their pension is worth millions and therefore they have to stay.

It really depends on how long you live. Even a good saver would struggle to have enough nest egg to cover 30 years of (fully-indexed retirement).

The PS gets a lot of flak due to their "gold plated pensions", but your point above is valid.. to a point.

My private sector experience is a company match to either 6 or 8% of salary, so the PS is generous, but not excessively so.

However, if PS employees are SOOOO convinced the plan is rock solid and funded, then why not agree to switch to a DC plan? My beef is that I'm on the hook as a taxpayer to fund any shortfall, and that's not fair.

Pension plans have failed all over the world, and in many private sector companies. As much as I believe in actuarial science, I have a hard time believing that working for 30 years, then retiring for 40 years is sustainable.

Simply switch to a DC plan and much of the argument against PS benefits would go away.

When I signed up to work for the feds, they asked me if I would be willing to die at 70.

..seemed like it.

I think that this is a fair assessment, particularly with respect to the longer retirements these days. It would be reasonable to look at increasing retirement ages in the plans, given the longer payout period.

As for taxpayers funding shortfalls, that is true, but taxpayers also receive the benefit when the plan investments do well in the sense that the government doesn't need to contribute, so has balanced out over time. It's a collective assumption of risk that I can accept.

I think people also believe that average pensions are much higher than they actually are. The average pension is something like $33,000, which isn't exactly a gold plated lifestyle. I'd also point out that people with pensions are greatly restricted in what they can contribute to RRSPs tax free, which offsets their impact on the tax system.

Personally I think pensions are a key factor in attracting and retaining talent in the public service. Rather than targeting pensions, I'd rather see the focus put on performance management and holding those that aren't doing their jobs accountable.

I didn't mean to suggest that all consultants are bad, just that a smaller public service isn't more efficient if the work is shifted to consultants at higher rates. Just looking at the numbers of public servants in a vacuum doesn't tell you much at all.

I do think that there are lots of incidents where we have public servants with the requisite skills to do what is needed, but due to budgets or politics or some other reason, the decision is to go out to consultants for the more interesting project or specialized work. In my experience that is regularly done regardless of whether the consultants truly have specialized skills, and it has to be incredibly demoralizing for the PS employees who have worked in that area for years. Particularly when projects are strung together and consultants are there for years and years, making multiples of what the public servants make.

I'm not sure what is meant by "government doesn't need to contribute"? Do you mean the Govt doesn't kick in it's 10% match if the plan is doing good?

The "collective assumption of risk" is something I cannot accept. Sounds like you're saying risk of plan falling short is SO LOW, why change things? I think the risk of the plan falling short (eventually) is not so low.. and I only think it's fair that risk is on the plan participants, and not pension-less private sector taxpayers.

DC is such a simple concept, and would kill the "gold plated pension" argument in a heartbeat... why such a reluctance to accept it?

Yes, if a consultant is there for years and years or works on something that is a permanent responsibility of that particular department then there has been some sort of a management or human resources failure.

But, if a project, initiative, etc. is only needed for a short term then it makes more sense to pay a consultant more in the short term than accrue a lifetime liability of hiring a permanent employee with an effective job for life and defined benefit pension.