Federal public-sector unions are moderately miffed by the government’s plan to compel their members to work from an office three days a week. They are promising not a revolution, nor a paralyzing general strike but, in a very Canadian touch, a “summer of discontent.”
That discontent is likely to take the form of a flood of grievances from some of the 400,000 or so affected workers who will now have to trudge into the office an additional day.
There’s a political front, too, with the unions appealing to the NDP to put pressure on their parliamentary allies to back off. The unions are not going to take what they view as a diktat sitting down, or at least not sitting down in an office chair.
It might be a managerial and political headache for the Liberals, but it’s a pain well worth bearing. The government is right to call its workers back to the office, both for reasons of cohesion and efficacy in the public service, and for the beneficial effect it will have on increasingly derelict urban centres and underused transit systems, particularly in Ottawa.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada insists that the whole exercise is an unnecessary provocation, and that civil servants ensconced in home offices are more productive than ever.
The union’s assertion is hard to square with the bloat in the ranks of the public service since the Liberals took office, a hiring spree that continues to accelerate. In 2015, the overall federal civil service numbered 257,034, down significantly from the 2010 count of 282,980. The Liberals had reversed those supposedly severe cuts by 2019 – and then went on to hire 70,000 more workers in the next four years.
Are those workers more productive, as PSAC claims? Or is the record pace of hiring simply making up for the hit to efficiency from an atomized workplace? There are no definitive data, but one fact is clear: the period of accelerated bloat certainly coincides with the arrival of the pandemic and the shift to working from home.
The negative effects on municipal economies and operations are much more clear. Downtown Ottawa is a shadow of its prepandemic self; ridership on its transit system, as with many other cities, has yet to fully rebound. The government’s move to increase office working hours will put more people on transit, and more dollars into the downtown.
There are legitimate concerns, particularly how it will square with the government’s parallel effort to shed surplus office space. The complexities of hotel-type shared office space will need to be ironed out. And there should be flexibility for individuals who can demonstrate real hardship.
But the unions’ frontal assault on the policy is not justified, particularly the intimation that management is breaking a compact with its workers. That is not the case.
The unions had a chance to make work-from-home guarantees the centrepiece of their labour negotiations last spring. Instead, they chose wage increases, with PSAC securing a handsome average cumulative raise of 12.6 per cent over four years. At the time, the government took a tough line on ceding control of a core right of determining where employees work – a correct stance in our view.
The unions cannot now turn around and resurrect the demands they dropped from the bargaining table in exchange for those wage increases.
PSAC does have one thing right: the government’s move to dial down working from home will ripple through the rest of the economy. As the country’s largest single employer, the federal government’s policies will give some added leeway to any private-sector employer looking to bring its workers back to the office.
The entire debate underscores the growing gap between the modern labour movement and the working class. Once synonymous, their experience and interests are now diverging. Truck drivers, plumbers, cashiers and construction workers don’t have the option of a comfortable berth in a home office. That is the prerogative of the keyboard class.
The federal civil service is already awash in perks that most Canadians can only dream of: ironclad job security and defined-benefit pensions fully indexed to inflation, and fully guaranteed by the federal treasury, are just the two most obvious examples.
The Liberals have indulged the civil service for far too long. Perhaps the return to the office can be the start of a more disciplined approach.