PSAC workers and supporters picket in front of President of the Treasury Board Mona Fortier's office in Ottawa, on April 21, 2023.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
It’s fun to imagine the planning that went into the campaign launched this week by the Ottawa chapter of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest union representing federal government workers.
“Okay, team, what’s the best way to make the case that we shouldn’t go back to the office, two years after everyone else did?”
“Ooh! Why don’t we call for a boycott of Ottawa small businesses that are still trying to scrape themselves off the pavement after COVID-19 shutdowns, the convoy siege and the abandonment of downtown?”
Et voilà, there was an Instagram post on Wednesday urging PSAC’s 165,000 federal workers to “Buy nothing” after – cue mournful violin solo – their employer required them to be in the office three days a week starting Sept. 9.
“The needs of the downtown core shouldn’t fall on the backs of workers and the federal public service. How workers spend their money on in-office days will send a clear message to politicians,” read the post from PSAC’s national capital region (NCR) chapter. It urged members to “pack a lunch and minimize spending on in-office days.”
This tone-deaf and spiteful campaign got the blowback it deserved. A day later, PSAC changed the post, replacing “Buy nothing” with “Buy local,” while accompanying text read, “We recognize a lot of our members don’t have extra spending money with the extra cost of commuting to the office over three days a week. What money is left is being spent on additional child care and commuting.”
Boy, that violin soloist sure got a lot of work this week.
Eventually, PSAC yanked the post, replacing it with a statement from Ruth Lau MacDonald, regional executive vice-president.
“I want to be very clear that PSAC-NCR is not calling for a boycott of downtown businesses, and I apologize for the impact and confusion this miscommunication has caused,” she said.
I had a number of questions for PSAC about this campaign and the broader issue of public perception. They went back and forth several times on someone doing an interview, but in the end sent written responses.
“We really do see remote work as the next big frontier in the fight for workers’ rights – and any gains unionized workers make will benefit workers in every sector of the country,” Ms. Lau MacDonald said. “So absolutely, gaining public support around this fight is key to our success. That’s also why this mistake is so costly.”
Ottawa embraces Luddite thinking in forcing civil servants back to the office
But the problem isn’t one ill-advised social-media campaign. Rather, it’s the pervasive sense that PSAC doesn’t quite get it, that they can’t really hear themselves as others do.
The union continues to behave like their members are the only Canadians paying for parking or transit, lining up child care, buying lunch or experiencing the apparently overwhelming hardship of showing up in person at work.
Over the past two years, each incremental policy change to in-office requirements for federal employees has brought another wave of loud public objections.
The unions stage protests and rallies; public servants give interviews bemoaning their commutes or need for child care, as though both are wholly unreasonable burdens no one else contends with. With this latest shift to three days a week, PSAC has filed multiple labour and legal complaints, along with encouraging members to file grievances.
If you live in the national capital (46 per cent of the federal public service is based in Ottawa-Gatineau), you get accustomed to transit and city streets being empty on Mondays and Fridays, to rush hour starting at 2 p.m. and to crossing paths with people who complain copiously about being forced into the office – while you yourself are standing at a bus stop or beside your car, on the way to your own workplace and not especially bent out of shape about it.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce Business Data Lab tracks workplace mobility patterns based on anonymized cell data. On average, Canadians commute 8 per cent less now than they did in January, 2020; downtown Ottawa, on the other hand, has experienced a 42-per-cent drop.
But Christiane Fox – deputy clerk of the Privy Council and the second-most-senior federal public servant – points out that these fights keep flaring up over work circumstances that apply to only a slice of the public service. She recently talked to a prison warden in Vancouver who’s had about enough of the yelling in Ottawa over this.
“We have these amazing opportunities within the public service to work for Canadians,” she said. “Let’s be grateful for that, and let’s get to work together.”
She outlines many reasons for the push to have people in the office more: the cross-pollination that happens when you sit beside someone who works on a different project; what you absorb as a new hire about not just what to do but how; the productivity of the whole machine as a great, sprawling organism.
I suspect all of this is common sense to a lot of people. Sure, during the pandemic, those who could work from home demonstrated that they could get their jobs done with more flexibility, and they wanted to keep some of that when life normalized. But they also learned what’s missing when a team never works in the same room, what happens to your headspace when you don’t leave your house and what it can do to your productivity when laundry, dinner ingredients or kids are staring at you as you sit at your desk.
And then there are all the people who never got to relocate their jobs to their dining-room tables in the first place.
Most of us have, at some point, listened to a recording of ourselves and, hearing our voice outside our heads, thought “Is that what I sound like?!” It’s not a comfortable experience, but it is instructive; PSAC and some of the more recalcitrant public servants might want to give it a try.