Harper Government to crack down on public servants -- again

[Peter F]

The federal public service cannot cash-out banked sick days. Upon leaving the Public Service those banked sick days simply disappear. They are not paid for in cash.

As such it is not an 'unfunded liability'. Since banked sick days vanish when not used the Treasury Board isn't on any hook for anything.

When used by the employee the Treasury Board does not pay out more in wages it would have anyways . The employee takes a sick day and is paid the wages he/she would have been paid for that day. Otherwise known as paid sick leave.

So its not an unfunded liability any more than wages-to-be-paid-this-year is an unfunded liability.

It is true that various other public employees (municipal or provincial) can cash out some or all of banked sick-leave. Even some private companies have terms where they cash out banked sick leave....but not the federal public service.

ETA: perhaps the RCMP or the military have a cash-out of banked sick leave upon retirement?

Edited September 16, 2014 by Peter F

[Moonbox]

How can you select a general graduate? Trained discipline professional comparison. Picking a BA grad who's selling vacuum s door to door is hardly a comparison. Pick BBA in a business job, BComp in a software company, etc.

The difference between the vacuum salesperson and the teacher is the $7800 (or less) paid for a 1 year teaching degree. Most teachers are BA's. Not only are most BA's entirely unimpressive academic achievements (with some of the lowest admittance requirements of their schools), but teacher's college itself is a joke. The worst part is that with nearly 10,000 teachers graduating in Ontario every year, most of them can't even find jobs despite rising class sizes. We can thank the Teacher's Union for that, who from one angle rail against the larger classes sizes and then from an another use their collective bargaining rights to bloat their compensation and ensure there are no jobs available for the glut of new and aspiring teachers.

The hilarious part about the whole fiasco is that despite the fact that it's now widely known that finding a job after teacher's college is often a dubious prospect, people STILL flock to Teacher's College on the CHANCE they could end up a teacher. The compensation is THAT much better than they'd find elsewhere.

[Moonbox]

It is true that various other public employees (municipal or provincial) can cash out some or all of banked sick-leave. Even some private companies have terms where they cash out banked sick leave....but not the federal public service.

I would surmise that this is a benefit that exists almost nowhere in the private sector, short of perhaps a closed-shop union environment. It's a benefit that should be abolished anywhere it exists, as it effectively amounts to extra vacation time the way it's used.

Interestingly, when Ontario Teacher's lost the right to bank and cash out their accumulated sick days, there was a tremendous uptake in sick-days taken off on Mondays and Fridays. Hmmm...

[Peter F]

Then banish it in those places where banked sick leave is cashed out. As it is Tony Clement and his conservative pals are going to town with the wrong folks. I will repeat: Federal Public Servants cannot cash out banked sick time.

[Peter F]

Oh wait...maybe i misunderstood.

It's a benefit that should be abolished anywhere it exists, as it effectively amounts to extra vacation time the way it's used.

You mean anyone who takes a sick day must be faking it. You're not talking about not-taking-sick-days, which is how banked sick-days accumulate. You're talking about the actual taking of sick days.

[Bob Macadoo]

Oh wait...maybe i misunderstood.

You mean anyone who takes a sick day must be faking it. You're not talking about not-taking-sick-days, which is how banked sick-days accumulate. You're talking about the actual taking of sick days.

He changes his story to fit his union outrage.

[Argus]

The PBO is full of it. It costs a lot, because the staffing levels need to be kept at a level that allows for those people to routinely not be at work, and not actually be missed. Taxpayers are paying for salaries and benefits for people who would not even be needed if the other employees actually had realisitc work expectations.

That's simply not true. Certainly it wasn't true in my case. Whenever I took time off, be it vacation or illness, whatever was in my in basket when I left along with all the stuff which came in while I was away, was waiting for me when I got back. I used to say they shouldn't even be taking away vacation/sick days since I had to make up all the work anyway. There are some cases, generally lower down, where others can make up for those away, but in any kind of complicated job there doesn't tend to be a lot of immediate backup.

[cybercoma]

You mean in the private sector, everyone comes to work every day no matter what?

The reasoning was so bizarre that it really didn't even warrant a response.

[Moonbox]

You're not talking about not-taking-sick-days, which is how banked sick-days accumulate. You're talking about the actual taking of sick days.

I was talking about both. Banking sick days is a ludicrous concept. Interestingly, however, when public sector employees don't have that benefit, they somehow tend to get sick much more often. Strange right?

You mean anyone who takes a sick day must be faking it.

Nope. Getting sick is a reality in life and you usually don't want your employee coming in either highly contagious or highly useless. What is NOT a reality, however, is that federal public sector employees get sick three times more than private sector employees which is how much more often they take time off 'sick'.

http://www.macleans.ca/politics/the-sick-day-scam/

He changes his story to fit his union outrage.

Bob how about you read that article and then try to explain how/why that's reasonable. Please.

Edited September 16, 2014 by Moonbox

[Peter F]

To enter into a rant...

It seems to me that this whole banking of sick time is bad meme that Tony Clement et al are on about,, is a red herring. What is it they are truly after?

The TB wants to eliminate the banking of accumulated sick time.

The TB wants employees to accumulate a maximum of 5 days of sick time.

The TB wants employees who are off work for longer than 5 days to be paid nothing at all for the first two weeks off then paid only 70 percent of their wages after that.

It seems to me that good ol' Tony Clement wants to get out of paying full wages for time taken off sick. They have no intention or plan (nor can they to be honest) of reducing the amount of sick time taken - they merely want to stop paying wages for sick time.

Thats the whole point of this exercise.

Anecdote: There I was on the Union negotiating team across the table from the Management negotiating team.

Management: You guys make way too much in overtime.

Union: Stop scheduling overtime and your problem is solved.

Management: We want to reduce how much you are paid for overtime because its killing us.

Union: Hire more people and you won't need overtime anymore

Management: We can't hire more people! It's bad management to have more employees than needed.

Union: Okay, so why do you schedule overtime?

Management: We still need the work to get done.

Union: Ah. So overtime is killing you yet you absolutely must have it. Really what you want is we work the same amount of overtime just that you pay us less for it.

This is the same as whats happening with the public service and TB now. There is no reduction of sick time taken just that it won't be paid sick leave anymore.

[Bob Macadoo]

That's simply not true. Certainly it wasn't true in my case. Whenever I took time off, be it vacation or illness, whatever was in my in basket when I left along with all the stuff which came in while I was away, was waiting for me when I got back. I used to say they shouldn't even be taking away vacation/sick days since I had to make up all the work anyway. There are some cases, generally lower down, where others can make up for those away, but in any kind of complicated job there doesn't tend to be a lot of immediate backup.

That's why explanation won't work.....the meme for the anti-unionist is that all members are just Joe Blow leaning on his shovel sipping a latte. They can't fathom any union worker works as hard as or harder than them so whatever benefit they receive is undeserved.

[Peter F]

I was talking about both. Banking sick days is a ludicrous concept. Interestingly, however, when public sector employees don't have that benefit, they somehow tend to get sick much more often. Strange right?

Nope. Getting sick is a reality in life and you usually don't want your employee coming in either highly contagious or highly useless. What is NOT a reality, however, is that federal public sector employees get sick three times more than private sector employees which is how much more often they take time off 'sick'.

http://www.macleans.ca/politics/the-sick-day-scam/

Bob how about you read that article and then try to explain how/why that's reasonable. Please.

So you're complaint is about the actual taking of sick leave and not the banking of sick days unused.

[Moonbox]

So you're complaint is about the actual taking of sick leave and not the banking of sick days unused.

My complaint is about the overall abuse of sick day benefits. If they're not banking sick days, then they're abusing it by taking ~3x as many sick days as private sector employees. Is that clear enough for you??

[Bob Macadoo]

The difference between the vacuum salesperson and the teacher is the $7800 (or less) paid for a 1 year teaching degree. Most teachers are BA's. Not only are most BA's entirely unimpressive academic achievements (with some of the lowest admittance requirements of their schools), but teacher's college itself is a joke.

No different than those BA's who flock to law school or those BSc who flock to dentistry.....a bloated trained profession is a trained profession. I'm sure your local high school Physics teacher appreciates your sleight though.

[overthere]

Harper has crqwacked down on civil servants by.... hiring a lot of them. That bastard.

[Bob Macadoo]

My complaint is about the overall abuse of sick day benefits. If they're not banking sick days, then they're abusing it by taking ~3x as many sick days as private sector employees. Is that clear enough for you??

So you advocate for ZERO sick days???

[Argus]

There hasn't been any strikes because the government has generally been compliant.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Raises over the last twenty years have not even kept pace with inflation. There haven't been strikes because the federal public sector unions just aren't very militant.

The government (and subsequently taxpayers) negotiate from a position of weakness because a disruption of services often has an EXTREMELY negative impact on the average person's life.

And again, this is utter nonsense as urgent services are maintained, which includes sending out all monthly cheques.

There's also an enormous public sector union lobby who, as we saw in the recent Ontario election, can throw millions of dollars for or against political candidates.

This is something which is pretty new, and we really only saw it last election in Ontario. I don't like it, but we can't say it has had any impact on the federal scene as of yet.

Read my post again. Equally skilled workers, on average, have significantly better compensation in the public sector than the private sector. A high school educated front-desk clerk makes a fortune more than a high-school educated fry cook.

Large organizations have more complex systems and policies. You can't compare, even people who do customer service for the government (probably the lowest level workers) with their counterparts working for small companies. Private sector call centers have massive turnover and are often staffed by people with little knowledge. That's generally not the case with the government.

It has tons of non-skilled positions.

Provide a list, please.

It also has tons of low-skilled positions where an ubiquitous 3-4 year university degree (doesn't matter in what) is enough to land them a $60,000+ compensation packages right out of university if you have a family member in the public sector already.

Yeahhh this is total crap. Where are these 'tons of low skilled positions?" And the only thing 'family' helps with is encouraging people to apply for public competitions, and perhaps letting them know, in some cases, that one is coming up. I don't know any entry level positions that pay $60k either, unless they're lawyers or something.

Some lower level staff actually means virtually all lower and even mid level staff.

I once paid bills for a small company which sold typewriters. I was also a clerk who paid the bills for the government. The two positions were not in the least similar in terms of their complexity or responsibility. I didn't do anything mid-range in the private sector, but as a midrange employee (program manager) I was in charge of a nationwide program for the government which touched on the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Canadians every year, which impacted hundreds of thousands more, and which made national headlines and led to questions in the House of Commons whenever things went wrong. Do you think I should have been paid minimum wage for that?

[Peter F]

I was talking about both. Banking sick days is a ludicrous concept. Interestingly, however, when public sector employees don't have that benefit, they somehow tend to get sick much more often. Strange right?

Nope. Getting sick is a reality in life and you usually don't want your employee coming in either highly contagious or highly useless. What is NOT a reality, however, is that federal public sector employees get sick three times more than private sector employees which is how much more often they take time off 'sick'.

http://www.macleans.ca/politics/the-sick-day-scam/

Bob how about you read that article and then try to explain how/why that's reasonable. Please.

Wait a minute...First off your macleans reference sucks; It moans about public servants taking more sick days than 'the norm' and provides examples from

various provincial and municipal public services of (alleged) abuse but not one peep about Federal public servant (alleged) abuse.

Then says that Tony Clement and the government are on the right track to end provincial and municipal workers abusing the system by reducing sick leave benefits of Federal public servants.

Second off how is not using sick days accumulated (banked sick time) abusive?

[Bob Macadoo]

My complaint is about the overall abuse of sick day benefits. If they're not banking sick days, then they're abusing it by taking ~3x as many sick days as private sector employees. Is that clear enough for you??

Wait maybe we should open up the Ministry of Truancy......I think another crony could use a politico job.

[cybercoma]

Do you think I should have been paid minimum wage for that?

No, but when you took days off for being sick, you were probably just faking it. ~sarcasm

[Moonbox]

Wait a minute...First off your macleans reference sucks; It moans about public servants taking more sick days than 'the norm' and provides examples from

various provincial and municipal public services of (alleged) abuse but not one peep about Federal public servant (alleged) abuse.

From the article:

At the federal level, where 19,000 civil servants phone in sick every day, the sick-leave liability has ballooned to $5 billion. The average federal civil servant now claims 18.2 sick days per year, roughly trebling the private sector average of 6.7 days, giving federal government workers the highest rates of absenteeism in the country.

Are you saying my Maclean's article sucks because it's demonstrating things that make your argument look stupid?

Then says that Tony Clement and the government are on the right track to end provincial and municipal workers abusing the system by reducing sick leave benefits of Federal public servants.

So you think it's perfectly reasonable for federal public servants to take an average of 18.2 sick days, compared to the private sector's average of 6.7? Is that what you're saying?

Second off how is not using sick days accumulated (banked sick time) abusive?

What are you even asking? Using (on average) 18+ sick days a year is abusive because you're essentially taking an extra 2 weeks of vacation every year on the taxpayer's dollar, when in fact it's designed to give people respite when they're actually sick. The practice of banking these sick days (to cash out or use at later date) simply legitimizes/systemizes it.

Edited September 16, 2014 by Moonbox

[cybercoma]

Wait a minute...First off your macleans reference sucks; It moans about public servants taking more sick days than 'the norm' and provides examples from

various provincial and municipal public services of (alleged) abuse but not one peep about Federal public servant (alleged) abuse.

Then says that Tony Clement and the government are on the right track to end provincial and municipal workers abusing the system by reducing sick leave benefits of Federal public servants.

Second off how is not using sick days accumulated (banked sick time) abusive?

The best part about Moonbox's argument is that the only way to bank sick time is by not taking sick time. We're complaining about people taking too much sick time, but we're going to solve that by not allowing them to bank the sick time that they don't take.

Edited September 16, 2014 by cybercoma

[Argus]

The average private sector worker can't hope to achieve similar pay/benefits because they would drive their company out of business. Good thing the government can't go out of business!

Really? How is it they manage to do this in much of Europe?

And don't come back about the miserable economies of the southern Europeans. Those are due to government misspending and there are plenty of the more northerly European nations which are doing fine despite requiring, that is to say REQUIRING BY LAW that all companies give their employees several weeks of sick leave and generally at least a month of vacations (often six to eight weeks).

Germany guarantees 30 days sick leave to all employees. France, Sweden and the UK cover them with no limits.

According to Wikipedia 98 countries provide at least 30 days of paid sick leave.

Here are the countries with no paid sick leave laws or requirements.

Countries with no paid sick leave

United States

India

Somalia

Angola

Chad

Georgia

Syria

Macedonia

Liberia

Sierra Leone

Guinea-Bissau

Mozambique

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

http://www.hrmonline.ca/hr-news/sick-leave-around-the-world-how-does-canada-stack-up-177765.aspx

Here is how Canada stacks up with the world in terms of vacation leave (for example). You'll see almost everyone gives more by law than Canada, including many third world countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country

Edited September 16, 2014 by Argus

[overthere]

That's why explanation won't work.....the meme for the anti-unionist is that all members are just Joe Blow leaning on his shovel sipping a latte. They can't fathom any union worker works as hard as or harder than them so whatever benefit they receive is undeserved.

In reality, federal civil servants enjoy superb pay, benefits and pensions. And of course enviable job security. A CR-4 level position starts at around $45k now and goes up from there. CR-4s are clerical positions and are numerous/very common throughout the federal civil service. A clerical position with similar responsibilities would earn far less at similar work, such as a bank ,insurance company or any private sector accounts receivable/payable department. And of course the benefits/pensions are not even close.

It has nothing to do with being pro or anti union or hard working or not, those are just the facts.

What is missing from all this discussion is the market value of the work performed.

The civil service unions federally and elsewhere have managed(to their credit) to manouever themselves into a position where market value for service has no place at the bargaining table- unlike private sector unions who have to deal with this routinely. That needs to change, and of course the change must come from the management as directed by politicians.

[Argus]

If the average person COULD get a job in the public sector then they would. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to do so for a host of reasons.

Yes, including lack of applicable education, job skills and experience.