Harper Government to crack down on public servants -- again

[Argus]

They're trying to eliminate the banking of sick days, which is a ludicrous concept in the private sector. They're also trying to curb the rampant abuse of sick day usage in the public sector. BTW, what's the 'sick days' average in the private sector and public sector right now?

No one has demonstrated there is 'rampant' abuse, and banking sick days actually makes sense as it dissuades people from using them up. People keep them just in case something serious, like a heart attack happens. When I left the government I left behind months of accumulated sick leave.

[Argus]

Well why don't we define that. I'll be going to bed shortly, but maybe for tomorrow we can compare the starting and 10 year wage of an average university grad to the starting and 10 year pay of a teacher (who's only done 1 extra year of school).If we can find another ~5 year program with similar requirements for academic achievement (ie. Teacher's college < Masters of Engineering) then we can look at that too?

Why is that relevant in terms of federal public servants and their sick leave?

[Argus]

It is an unfunded liability, and also results in higher absenteeism, if they don't fill the position with a temp then I suppose it wouldn't cost them much more except on retirement - if they can cash them out. If they can't cash them out then it's not as huge a liability, does anyone know if they can?

No. Federal public servants can't cash out their sick leave. I wish they could. I left behind months of sick leave when I quit.

And there's no evidence it results in higher absenteeism either. I know I didn't want to abuse mine because I figured I might need it a lot more when I got older, and if something bad happened, well.. it was like building up an insurance policy.

And btw, if you do have to be off for months the government requires you use that sick leave up all of it, before being eligible for the normal disability/UIC payments Canadians can apply for.

[Argus]

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.

I have a friend who used to have to sit in her car outside work trying to ease her queasy stomach every morning before going in because the stress and workload was literally making her sick. Many people I know now work through their breaks and often eat a sandwich at their desk while working. Yes, there are some who do little work, but those are special cases which involve incompetent managers (of which there are MANY) combining with incompetent employees.

[Argus]

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??

But they're not. Why don't you have a look at post number ten in this topic?

Edited September 16, 2014 by Argus

[Moonbox]

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.

I don't know what I'm talking about? Why is it that the public sector (who previously earned less overall in 1991) have now reversed their position and are earning more than their private sector counterparts with similar skills/education?

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

like the BC teachers, right? It must have been really nice for Toronto residents to watch their garbage pile on the curb while the highly educated garbage collectors went on strike. Utter nonsense!

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.

It's only new because the lobbyists used to be able to contribute large amounts directly to a party's campaign. Now they can't, so they're finding other ways to affect the vote.

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.

You can absolutely make comparisons. A customer service person at the Ministry of Transportation, for example, makes boat loads more than a customer service rep for a major bank. Both have strict regulatory requirements and significant training requirements. The bank CSR however, doesn't have a union backing him/her.

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.

Call centres have massive turnover because the jobs are a lot more stressful and pay a lot less.

Provide a list, please.

Yeahhh this is total crap. Where are these 'tons of low skilled positions?"

All of the CSR positions. How many of them are there do you think?

I don't know any entry level positions that pay $60k either, unless they're lawyers or something.

Salary, no. Overall compensation? Yes, or at least approaching that. I've worked in finance for over 10 years and I know what people make.

I once paid bills for a small company which sold typewriters.

So 35 years ago? Useless info. The public sector compensation advantage is a phenomenon of the last 20-25 years. Let's move on.

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.

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

I think you should have been paid a wage comparable to what a similar private sector position would have paid (similar skill levels/complexity).

[Argus]

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/

It's odd how it says public servants take over 18 sick days a year when they only get 15 sick days a year. And somehow, they manage to build up a huge bank of unused sick days which amounts to billions of dollars. Could you have a go at explaining the reasoning here?

[Big Guy]

...

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.

Be it sick days or pregnancy leave or extra health benefits or ... it is the result of bargaining and negotiating. Some request (demand) is removed to get another request (demand). It means an agreement between employer and employee as to the conditions of employment.

Now if you feel that it is not fair, too much or not enough, then too bad. You can feel what you want.

I feel that everybody but you and me are making way too much and getting far too many benefits for the job that they do!

And I'm not so sure about you.

[Moonbox]

No one has demonstrated there is 'rampant' abuse, and banking sick days actually makes sense as it dissuades people from using them up. People keep them just in case something serious, like a heart attack happens. When I left the government I left behind months of accumulated sick leave.

Again, I'll ask, why is the sick-related absenteeism THREE TIMES HIGHER in the federal public service? Please give me a reasonable explanation, because if you can't, then I can't see how that's not abuse.

[overthere]

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.

Yes, it can easily be a liability because a thinking civil servant will find an illness to end their career with, and get paid many of those accumulated benefits. Full salary for a few weeks or months before the pension kicks in....

"Stress leave" is very popular, and it definitely gets paid in cash. And who doesn't have a variety of health gripes to manipulate by retirement age if being stressed is too stressful??

[Moonbox]

It's odd how it says public servants take over 18 sick days a year when they only get 15 sick days a year. And somehow, they manage to build up a huge bank of unused sick days which amounts to billions of dollars. Could you have a go at explaining the reasoning here?

First, it didn't say they were banking sick days, which I understand is not allowed there, correct? As for 18 sick days instead of 15, there could be a host of reasons. It could be that people are just taking 3 extra days unpaid. It's more likely that they're taking the 3 extra days and it's not worth it for it for managers to make an issue of it.

Now that I've answered your question (thinly disguised as an attempt to discredit the article), would you care to take a stab at why federal employees are taking 3x as much sick leave as private sector employees and what makes this reasonable?

[Peter F]

ah, I see the problem. You think Macleans is right on the money with their numbers. You are wrong.

Macleans:

At the federal level, where 19,000 civil servants phone in sick every day, the sick-leave liability has ballooned to $5 billion.

What liability? 19000 employees phone in sick - and get paid sick leave for that day. They get paid what they normally would have been paid if they

had come to work - the concept of paid sick leave again. They get paid the wages that have already been allocated and budgeted for. What liability has ballooned to the shocking amount of $5 billion by them taking sick days?

Macleans:

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.

I don't know where Nancy Mcdonald got her figures from...probably Tony Clement... but the Parliamentary Budget Office disagrees

(see: http://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/files/files/Sick%20Leave%20II%20_EN.pdf) According to them Federal Public Servants use 11.4 paid sick days per year on average. As has been mentioned elsewhere, Tony Clements figure of 18.x sick days includes unpaid sick leave and injury on duty leave.

(see: http://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/files/files/Response_IR0126_TBS_Mod_Sick_Leave_Benefits_EN.pdf)

...but again this has got sweet dick-all to do with banked sick leave...

Macleans:

The Harper government just announced plans to crack down on “exceedingly” high absenteeism among civil servants. Reforms would focus on getting sick and injured civil servants back to work faster, by introducing a short-term disability program. And Ottawa hopes to reduce from 15 to as few as five the number of unused sick days civil servants can carry over. “Age-old entitlements like these,” says Clement, “serve as a tax on Canadians.”

They will reduce exceedingly high absenteeism by not paying for sick days taken anymore. Tony Clements plan may actually work! Employee's are generally loath to take unpaid sick days, or any other unpaid days, off work - even when they are sick!

Unpaid sick days means more sick people coming to work. Simple as that really. That being so then Tony Clements plan may actually have some sense.

Unfortunately it doesn't deal with banked sick time (time not taken off sick - which is somehow abusive and leads to this exceedingly high absenteeism).

Macleans:

as Treasury Board President Tony Clement has noted, the closer they get to retirement, the sicker they seem to get. Retiring employees used an average of 45 sick days before retiring in 2009-10—two full months off work.

No shit Sherlock. Old folks get sick more often. Whodathunk?

[Argus]

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.

To $49,000 after a number of years.

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.

Perhaps. I haven't studied them all. I do know most of them are non-unionized specifically because their companies like to stick it to the employees as much as possible. And the private sector tries to spin off lower level jobs. For example, I used to process insurance claims for Sun Life. I didn't work for them, though. Sun Life had paid people about $14hr to do this, but then gave the job of processing claims to a company called Business Data Systems, which hired people for minimum wage and stuck them in a sort of sweatshop business mall office. Sun Life was happy. BDS was happy. The employees got screwed over.

As a CR-04 my job was to make some purchases and to process payments for my directorate, as well as to print out financial reports for management. I put hundreds of thousands of dollars on my government credit card each month, created requisitions and purchase orders and made payments to them (these were the larger payments), hired temporary help staff, dealt with contractors, and made payments to a wide variety of both private and public sector organizations. I used the SAP system, and became something of a whiz on it, and had to pretty much have Treasury Board and CRA financial guidelines and policies (of which there are TONS) memorized. I also issued and validated signing authority under section 34 of the Treasury Board Financial Administration act, and maintained petty cash. I advised directors and managers on purchasing regulations and bidding requirements and liaised daily with my CR5 counterpart at Finance Branch on a variety of issues (usually stupid managers doing things against the rules).

And the longer I was there the better I got at it, and the fewer mistakes I made. I wound up training all new finance clerks and helping the existing ones who weren't sure about regulations or processes. It's called institutional memory, and paying decent salaries helps keep people around so you have some of that.

I was, I would suggest, actually underpaid given my value to the organization.

[Argus]

Yes, it can easily be a liability because a thinking civil servant will find an illness to end their career with, and get paid many of those accumulated benefits. Full salary for a few weeks or months before the pension kicks in....

You need to get your doctor to sign off on it, and often enough the government will also require a doctor from Health Canada to look at you and agree. Some people get away with it, but then some people get away with getting disability cheques when they're not disabled. Does that mean you do away with disability pensions?

[Argus]

First, it didn't say they were banking sick days, which I understand is not allowed there, correct?

Have you read none of the posts so far, nor the original article? The banking of sick leave is one of the major issues here.

As for 18 sick days instead of 15, there could be a host of reasons. It could be that people are just taking 3 extra days unpaid. It's more likely that they're taking the 3 extra days and it's not worth it for it for managers to make an issue of it.

Moonbox, with all due respect, that's ludicrous. First, I have never been anywhere in the government where you could take extra sick days and have your manager not make an issue of it. Nor have I ever heard from any of my friends in other departments of anything remotely similar. The closest would be one friend who could take sick days off on an unofficial basis out of an unofficial hour bank he'd built up with his director through massive amounts of unpaid overtime.

I would suggest to you the figure of over 18 days a year is nonsense based on bullshit statistics put together by the Tea Party (aka the Canadian Federation of Independent Business). I believe one of the things they did was count employees off on long-term disability (this is not the same as sick leave and is paid by an insurance company). Let's say, for example, that you have six clerks in a group. Five of them almost never miss a day but one is out for six months due to a serious illness. What do you think the statistics are going to say for the number of sick days for that group?

Edited September 16, 2014 by Argus

[cybercoma]

I don't know where Nancy Mcdonald got her figures from...probably Tony Clement... but the Parliamentary Budget Office disagrees

(see: http://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/files/files/Sick%20Leave%20II%20_EN.pdf) According to them Federal Public Servants use 11.4 paid sick days per year on average. As has been mentioned elsewhere, Tony Clements figure of 18.x sick days includes unpaid sick leave and injury on duty leave.

(see: http://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/files/files/Response_IR0126_TBS_Mod_Sick_Leave_Benefits_EN.pdf)

...but again this has got sweet dick-all to do with banked sick leave...

Including long-term disability in the sick leave is shady crap. People on LTD are obviously going to be off a lot longer than the average employee. This would also dramatically increase the mean average. Say an entire office of people takes on average 3-4 sick days a year, then one person is off for 6 months for LTD. Just as an example, we'll pretend there's 6 employees in the office.

John 2 days

Lisa 3 days

Sharon 1 day

Mike 6 days

Ted 3 days

Larry (LTD)180 days

The mean average sick time for that office would be 32.5 sick days. Does that give an accurate picture of how many sick days the average employee is taking at that office? Absolutely not. A more accurate depiction would be the median number of sick days which cuts the labour force at the 50th percentile. The median number of sick days taken by this office is 3 days. This controls for the LTD case which is an outlier and gives a more accurate depiction of how many sick days are being taken on average by the employees.

[Peter F]

Including long-term disability in the sick leave is shady crap. People on LTD are obviously going to be off a lot longer than the average employee. This would also dramatically increase the mean average. Say an entire office of people takes on average 3-4 sick days a year, then one person is off for 6 months for LTD. Just as an example, we'll pretend there's 6 employees in the office.

John 2 days

Lisa 3 days

Sharon 1 day

Mike 6 days

Ted 3 days

Larry (LTD)180 days

The mean average sick time for that office would be 32.5 sick days. Does that give an accurate picture of how many sick days the average employee is taking at that office? Absolutely not. A more accurate depiction would be the median number of sick days which cuts the labour force at the 50th percentile. The median number of sick days taken by this office is 3 days. This controls for the LTD case which is an outlier and gives a more accurate depiction of how many sick days are being taken on average by the employees.

Exactly. According to Tony Clement Sharon is abusing her sick leave benefits and must be reigned in.

[Peter F]

It's odd how it says public servants take over 18 sick days a year when they only get 15 sick days a year. And somehow, they manage to build up a huge bank of unused sick days which amounts to billions of dollars. Could you have a go at explaining the reasoning here?

Yeah, thats a bit of a puzzle. How can they bank unused sick time when they are using it?

[cybercoma]

More to the point, who wants a disincentive for people to take their sick time when they work in an office in close-quarters with others? When you force people to come to work sick because they won't be paid to stay home, then you get everyone else in the office sick which increases the amount of time off people are taking.

[Peter F]

Yes, but at least there would be no more abuse of sick leave and a reduction of absenteeism. Some manager will be able to wear that particular feather in his cap even when its destructive in the long term.

[cybercoma]

It's all just stupid myopic penny-pinching thinking that doesn't account for the context of the costs. It will end up costing the government more in the long run, but then again the Conservatives seem to have a habit of doing stuff then realizing it's a bad decision and going back on their plans. To Harper's credit, he's so obsessed with power that he's willing to change gears. That's a good thing. The fact that this government seems to be running things by trial and error is a bad thing though. It's incredibly inefficient and wasteful, especially for a government that markets itself as the save-the-taxpayers-dollars party.

[Peter F]

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.

Well I suppose if laying in a hospital bed after bypass surgery is a vacation Then I guess you have a point.

[Peter F]

It's all just stupid myopic penny-pinching thinking that doesn't account for the context of the costs. It will end up costing the government more in the long run, but then again the Conservatives seem to have a habit of doing stuff then realizing it's a bad decision and going back on their plans. To Harper's credit, he's so obsessed with power that he's willing to change gears. That's a good thing. The fact that this government seems to be running things by trial and error is a bad thing though. It's incredibly inefficient and wasteful, especially for a government that markets itself as the save-the-taxpayers-dollars party.

Oh yes, I agree. All they see is how many millions they will save by kicking employee's off of paid sick leave sooner. The PBO estimated paid sick leave costs the TB $871 million (2012-2013). The government has been hounding TB to cut costs and the ladder-climbers have targeted that money.

The stupidity and resulting inefficiency matter not - only how much $$$ they can offer unto their overlords.

ETA: and the present banking of sick time is what is stopping the RH Tony Clement from kicking employees of paid sick days - thus the demonization of it.

Edited September 16, 2014 by Peter F

[cybercoma]

It's the tyranny of numbers done wrong. This idea that only the numbers matter comes from Wall St. and it dehumanizes us all. The numbers do matter, but only when they're put into context. For all the number crunching that statisticians, economists (specifically econometricians), and business admins learn, it's like they completely lose sight of the human implications of those numbers. The numbers are meaningless if you don't understand where they come from or why they are what they are. Nate Silver said in his book, "numbers don't have meaning" and he was right. We speak for the numbers, but more importantly the numbers are representations of lives and real people, their decisions and their experiences. When you lose sight of that, you dehumanize everyone.

[Argus]

It's all just stupid myopic penny-pinching thinking that doesn't account for the context of the costs. It will end up costing the government more in the long run,

This is not designed to save the government money. It's designed to show how 'tough' the Conservatives are on those lazy, overpaid, pampered, miserable public servants everyone hates.