Reform of Pampered Public Service Must Begin at the Top
Okay, first of all, is there any real doubt where this mysterious leak of a confidential government report on public service sick leave actually comes from? Whether you agree with it or not, you should be a little bit cautious about being distracted by what’s obviously a leak from a Conservative insider hoping to change the agenda of the government and shore up its flagging public opinion through a good old war on the bureaucracy. The Conservatives are not serious about saving public funds spent on salaries and benefits.
Oh, they’re serious about suppressing labour in the public service. They have no problem with that. But if they were really serious about this new economy initiative, they’d start with themselves. On principle, if nothing else. Remember principle? To help us along, I’ve produced a handy chart comparing the average job requirements and benefits in the civil service with the average ones of their bosses in Parliament:
Work Days Per Year 249 126
Sick and Personal Days 15 Unlimited
Vacation Days 15-30 117
Pension Plan 2% per year, to 70% after 35 years 3% per year, to 75% after 25 years
Top Executive Salary $300,000 $317,000 plus expenses
Top Non-Executive Salary About $100-$120,000 $157,000
Required Duties Depends on position None
Duty of Loyalty Most criticism of government prohibited Absolute freedom of expression
And even after all this, do I think the public service benefits are in need of slashing? Not really. MPs seem to think that these sorts of benefits are necessary in order for them to do their jobs properly. So why wouldn’t the same be true of their employees?
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kootcoot
I beg to differ, and so would Mr. Wilkes about MPs having “Absolute freedom of expression.” In theory they do, but in reality if they don’t toe the party line they best begin looking for other employment.
Moira Law
hi — Thanks for writing this. I am not a public servant but I am heartily tired of the attacks on them that probably date from 1867 when DMs worked from 10 to 3. Leadership works. The nastiness at the top has percolated down so that the public service is an awful place to work and not the feather bed most people imagine. I suspect their loss of benefits is inevitable. Is the objective to make the government so ineffective that all Canadians will agree with their anti-government ideology? Such a shame that our belief in community and collective action can be so easily destroyed.
jrkrideau
“Oh, they’re serious about suppressing labour in the public service.”
Indeed they are. They must be salivating at Wisconsin’s success in gutting collective bargaining.
They are also very determined to not tolerate any dissension or criticism of government policies. I have heard that Parks Canada and Corrections Canada employees have received strong warnings about talking to the press and Federal scientists have been muzzled for years.
On a different scale, the firing of Linda Keen from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for actually doing her job is unlikely to make senior bureaucrats feel safe if they actually tell their ministers the truth if it disagrees with government ideology.
With a Conservative Government out to cut the size of the Civil Service and with a reputation for repressing dissent , it would not be surprising if sickness both physical and mental increased under these conditions of stress and uncertainty.
When you don’t know what’s happening and even if you don’t loose your job you probably are going to have to do more with less you are not likely to be the most healthy and productive worker.
And the worst part of the cutting of thousands of Civil Servant jobs is that it is unlikely to save money as in many cases the work must be done and so it’s farmed out to contractors at the same or a higher rate of pay. But, gee, you, as the despised civil servant will have to write the RSPs and contracts and then administer the contracts.
It would be nice to see the ‘leaked’ report but from some StatsCan data it does look like the government has an absenteeism problem and one that is increasing.
From a reference in the comments section of the article referenced above, I pulled out a bit of data on absentee rates (Source: Work Absence Rates Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 71-211-X Table 4-26) and it looks like there is a pronounced increase in the use of sick time over the last few years. Graph at http://www.mediafire.com/i/?5zj4rk4cij6dwfc .
One of the interesting things is the difference in the use of personal/family time vs. sick time. The 2001-2011 plot of personal/family time is basically flat while the sick time is climbing quite impressively. I don’t know how difficult it is to take a personal/family day as opposed to a sick day but if you are gaming the system then why not use both?
If we just had a bunch of lazy workers I’d expect that workers in 2001 would have been goofing off about as much as workers in 2012. Instead we have an increasing rate of sick days taken. If it was SARS we would have had a health panic by now!
Of course, one of the reasons for so many sick days being taken may be because one can. Not that one is not sick, but rather, it does not have a significant effect on earnings so if if one really is sick, one can stay at home and get well.
In both the public and private sectors I have seen sick people drag themselves into work but it seems more prevalent in the private sector in organizations without sick provisions . People who should have been in bed or at the hospital instead were spreading germs around the workplace.
Sixth Estate
jrkrideau — I can’t find the link to the actual letter at the moment, which I have read, but here’s a summary of the Parks Canada gag order:
http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/news/story/2012/06/14/ns-parks-canada-letter-warning.html
The current interpretation of “duty of loyalty,” in general, means to refrain from any “public criticism of the government.”
Regarding personal days vs sick days — I’m not actually certain on this, so don’t take my word on it, but the collective agreements might only allocate a small number of personal days per year. So once you reach that limit, there’s no further personal days to take, whether you’re trying to “abuse” the system or not.
Sixth Estate
Having seen that graph — did StatsCan only begin tracing that number in 2001, or is that just what you chose to graph? It would be interesting to know how far back the gradual increase in sick time began.
It’s also a hard one to critique without being able to say what a “baseline” rate of sick days actually is. The private sector average actually isn’t an appropriate baseline, unless you’re prepared to argue that people never take a day off when they actually should for health reasons but don’t feel prepared to for employment reasons.
Sixth Estate
kootcoot — Like most MPs, you are confusing the party membership requirements with the job requirements. The political party does not write their paycheques. These two contradictory sets of requirements can only be sustained as long as MPs agree that they matter.
J Doe
The federal government may have wanted to leak this document to bash public sector unions, but it’s important to recognize that sick time is a fairly reliable indicator of employee morale, i.e. the higher the number of sick days, the lower the morale. In fact, in Ontario, the Ministry of Health requires hospitals to track sick time for this very reason.
So if you look at sick days from this point of view, what does it tell you about the federal government’s management of its public sector employees — who appear to be disengaged and demoralized?
It’s not a document I’d be flaunting. It just tells you management of federal employees suck.
chris
‘f we just had a bunch of lazy workers I’d expect that workers in 2001 would have been goofing off about as much as workers in 2012. Instead we have an increasing rate of sick days taken. If it was SARS we would have had a health panic by now!’
If you could drill down you’d find stress leave. The interface between government and the people it is supposed to serve is broken and a lot of people on both sides are paying a heavy price.
Sixth Estate
J Doe — It’s a document that feeds the party’s present agenda of attacking the bureaucracy at a time when the party needed a distraction from the aftermath of the omnibus law. I see you’re point about other leak sources, but for the moment I don’t agree that that’s more likely. You and I may agree that increased sick time implies increased stress and problems in the workplace, but I suspect that to both the Conservatives and their key constituency it’s just evidence that civil servants don’t have to live up to the same expectations as their private-sector counterparts.
jrkrideau
@ Sixth Estate
That was just what was easy to grab from the one table. I’m lazy about cutting and pasting so I didn’t go back further yesterday. I have found data going back as far as 1993. I suspect that if there is earlier data it may all be hard copy. and that could be harder to track down.
Interestingly enough it looks sickleave is almost a linear trend from there. Have a look at http://www.mediafire.com/i/?t4z7j8jpe4cbtks .
Again the personal/family days are pretty consistently close to flat. There looks like some kind of periodicity there but there is just not a big range.
I wonder what sick leave entitlements were across those years?
I may have to spend some time looking at some other occupational groups and see what’s happening with them. A quick eyeball inspection of the Educational figures for 2001 – 2011 gives the impression that the sick figures are going up there too.
@ J Doe and Chris
It sure looks like it. The continual downsizings since the Chretien/Martin era combinded with the more recent Harper gov’t paranoia is undoubtly raising stress levels considerably and it’s pretty clear that some parts of the gov’t have bad management.
Sixth Estate
I agree with your last point. This would be consistent with the idea that it’s related to an increasingly problematic workplace, since the first contemporary austerity cycle began under Chretien. Interestingly, the figure started at around 6 days per year, which is the private-sector average that the news was comparing the public sector to.
I appreciate you putting this chart together because that provides fuel for a further post on the subject. Would you be willing to let me use that chart if I credit you with it?
jrkrideau
@ Sixth Estate
Fell free to use it.
I also just uploaded another interesting graph from the same two data sources StatCan publications 71-211-x2004000-eng.pdf & 71-211-x2012000-eng-1.pdf.
It looks like Federal Employees and Health & Social Assistance workers have somewhat similar absenteeism rates while my other two groups are quite different.
If we’re going to be slagging Federal employees I guess we need to complain about all those lazy doctors and nurses.
jrkrideau
Oops forgot to paste the link
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?33iz4d667i7q9r0
jrkrideau
“It’s also a hard one to critique without being able to say what a “baseline” rate of sick days actually is.
I put together a couple of charts on absenteeism by StatCan industry group, 2011 absenteeism by industrial groups and absenteeism by industrial groups for 2001 and 2012 that make interesting reading.
We, really, would also have to know a lot more about the work force composition, age. sex breakdown and so on before we can discuss a base absenteeism rate intelligently.
It seems clear from just eyeballing the data in the StatCan tables that females have more absenteeism which is in line with what we know about women usually taking on more care responsibilities for family members.
On the other hand I don’t know what the age breakdowns are for the various industry groups though the documents make the point that older workers have more absenteems and from what I have heard the Federal Civil Service is aging.
I get the impression that a number of the groups with low absenteeism look like those who probably have the worst benefit packages thought an interesting outlier is the Professional, scientific & technical services group with the least number of days absent. Possibly speaking to the level of importance and interest in what they do?
James
I worked for the Public Service in Canada for some 10 years in the I T world. At the time, in the 1980s, the access to training, even promotions was pretty good. It really helped if you were tied into a network. More who you knew than abilities, but ability still counted. I know from my many friends in the Public Service that the I T world is now inhabited by lazy third world types, but if you are not an Asian, which is the new network, you probably wont get ahead. I suspect that most large organizations are oriented on who you know, and unless you are ambitious, you just keep your head down and press onward toward retirement. In my dealings with the Public Service, I find them very unhelpful, they use their answering machines to filter calls, and the word NO is the first response. They also never use discretion, they are jobsworthes.