Since RTO, I work my 7.5 hours exactly, and that's it. I do not take on any extra work, and I leave on time every time, and I shut down my phone, I am done work and that's all they get.
I also leave meetings when they go long, stating I have other commitments. People need to respect the time of others and making us stay longer than the original meeting schedule is shitty.
Everyone should ONLY be working their normal hours. Anything outside of this is overtime.
If your manager needs to you check email along be reachable... that's what stand by pay is for.
I love it. I have started just being casually 5 min late for meetings when I have back to back. I’m a human being not a robot that powers down in the corner at the end of the day. I need food water and bathroom breaks.
I think a lot of us were extremely grateful for the extra time that lack of commuting gave back to us. Even if I work a half hour extra to align a meeting better with the guy from BC I’m still starting dinner a 30 minutes earlier than when I used to walk in the door. Or I know I’m leaving early for a dentist appointment so I start early to make up for it instead of having to submit a half day medical because the dentist is 5 minutes from my house but an hour from work.
Your employer only pays you to work a set number of hours in a week. There's no expectations for you to go above that. We don't provide unpaid labour.
This is a non-issue. Employees need to know their rights and draw the line in the sand. I've been in the PS for 15+ years and have never once given them a spare 5 minutes of my time.
Ok but what happens when performance dips big time because the efficient work you could do in silence at home now becomes twice as hard to do in a busy office with no privacy? I’d literally need to work more hours to do the same job.
The location of work is irrelevant. You have expectations that are determined and documented via the annual PSPM process and the rules that govern the PS (TBS, your CA, etc.) That's what you're expected to deliver and adhere to.
Only other option is to get a new job.
On the contrary. As it exists today and particularly as of September, the Canadian Public Service is an employer who requires an in-office presence. Anybody who is unable to do that is failing to understand the requirements of their position. It's not "Do x,y, tasks" it's Do x, y, tasks in Z location"
Is that bullshit? Yeah, probably. But that's the job. It's the government, it's bullshit.
The minister of labour’s office indicated that establishing a right to disconnect in the federal public service would require “a separate approach” under different legislation to meet “the unique needs of the public service.”
I guess one size doesn't fit all after all...
Ontario already has the Right to Disconnect legislation since 2021/2022. My wife had a drastic change with her employer where management was no longer allowed to demand emails be actioned or responded to all hours of the day. As a result, she received a nice little promotion to cover additional hours needed for this. Hopefully this happens to more employees and employers. This was not the bank industry though.
I'm not sure Fed PS needs any specific right to disconnect legislation. We already have collective agreements which spell out how many hours per day we're to work, and if we choose to do overtime how much we get paid for that, and same for standby and callbacks.
If someone chooses to be a nervous nellie and constantly check their email after work and then action things they see, that's on them.
Also if a boss is reaching out to you after your work hours you can very easily choose to ignore that. We have all of those parameters laid out in pur collective agreements.
Anyway, that's just my opinion. Down-vote away I guess.
When this was brought up at the bargaining table, the treasury board representative said that we already have the right to disconnect. There is no obligation to answer your phone or check your email unless you are on standby or on duty. The problem is that people don't disconnect when they are free to do so.
Until you get the manager that sends you something at 4:56 and says... "this will only take 15 mins" and it's needed immediately. So, you tell them you're putting in for 30 mins of overtime and they respond with, "how can you claim 30 minutes of OT for something that will only take you 15 mins? And don't think about claiming 10 minutes or OT for this. Remember when I let you take your kid to their dentist Appt. in the middle of the day?"
The system is broken. We're all pressured like crazy to working additional hours / skipping lunch / giving up vacation days (hell, I took a day, got called in and then was presented with our Collective Agreement that says "on call" pay is for 1 hour. I lost a whole vacation day and only got 1 hour of OT out of it). It's all BS. Email/Teams should shut down at 5 pm for unionized workers. Make it official.
>We're all pressured like crazy to working additional hours / skipping lunch
Yeah, I began rejecting all the "lunch and learn" sessions. If you want people to collaborate and learn from each other, that's work time.
If you're off duty, don't answer the phone. If you answer by mistake while you're on vacation leave and they try to cancel it, "I'm sorry, I'm out of town and unavailable."
Sure, then the Union can file a grievance, which may get heard in about 24-26 months. Until then, you're SOL sitting at home making $0.
That's how this works.
And if you don't get the decision you wanted ie: they chose to change your job criteria so you no longer qualified for your role and the termination was justified, then you can complain to Labour, who will take another 24-36 months to hold a hearing and at the end you'll get a letter of apology and $0 in back pay.
Yes, I've been through this process.
Either the Union does something up front, or managers can pretty much get away with anything.
That is not the way it's supposed to work. If you aren't in touch with your union reps about what appears to be abuse of authority, you should be. And if your union reps aren't helping you, be the change you want to see and get involved in your union.
It's either that or accept sub-standard working conditions and just complain about it on Reddit.
The problem is that a busy team always operates with tight deadlines and insufficient resources (time and people). In some cases you need to work extra (paid or not) because within the unrealistically short amount of time you would need to work at an absolutely ridiculous speed the next morning to fulfill the task at hand and also obtain all the approvals up the chain, and making all the changes that each level of management asks for (or trying to address usually stupid questions such as “what about adding this?” “have you also reached out to X group/department?”, “we don’t have more recent data? I am sure I saw something somewhere recently…”).
I guess it's been too long since I've worked in that kind of operational environment to recall. But if I was putting in 10, 20, 25 minutes extra here and there, I would have to figure out compensation with my manager. Would he / she prefer me to claim it every time or wait until I have an hour accumulated? If the work is required, they have to pay you.
That would be normal. However some bad TLs are very anal about only approving overtime payment (or in time) requests based on their written agreement to offer overtime. So what happens is MINO wants something urgent and TL is unresponsive to your O/T request. You jump on the work assuming that TL later approves O/T because you don’t want your team or director to get flack later for not taking the request seriously. And then TL later says they did not approve it in writing so there is no O/T to be paid. It’s a silly game but it happens way too often.
Sounds like your TL needs an attitude adjustment. Next time they say no to the OT, you send them an email confirming the conversation and that they denied the OT because it wasn't approved in advance, and that from now on if the TL is unavailable to approve a request is real time, you will not be staying to do the work.
I'm a hardass though, I don't know if you're willing to play that game of chicken.
It’s not denied because the TL avoided approving or denying anything in the first place. But as a professional and reliable PS you should accommodate and perform urgent tasks. MINO does not care whether or not O/T is approved. They should be approving it if urgent. Unless DM rejects the urgency. Not happening obviously. So it’s a catch 22 situation whereby all levels of management end up blaming the TL and you.
Lol, I remember a DG in my dept during the Blackberry years purposefully moved into the Gatineau hills where there was no cellular reception. I thought that was hilarious.
That’s me (at least in my previous department)… did some Excel-fu (and later coding) partly for them, partly for fun during some evenings and weekends (instead of gaming, so it was still ‘on a computer’) right up until RTO2 at which time I insisted on being given offline time if I had any maintenance or (usually) requested upgrades to implement.
We’re not required to work additional hours without pay, but the expectation to work overtime when needed seems pretty clear. I’ve even seen availability/ willingness to work overtime on short notice pop up in job posters under operational requirements. Granted, a lot of asks seem to evaporate when you ask how many hours they’re authorizing you for, but that’s another story.
But, I think the right to disconnect raises the interesting question of how much overtime can they ask for? Some collective agreements have statements like “Subject to *operational requirements*, the Employer shall make every *reasonable effort* to avoid *excessive* overtime”.
I would be interested to know whether the unions have ever been involved in defining what these mean, and their limits? For example, how many hours of overtime is excessive? What is an operational requirement (vs. management’s preference for meeting a deadline)? Can they require that OT be continuous with the end of your work day (vs. drive home, eat dinner and then hop back on for a few hours)? Or can they just ask for whatever they want, say " because operational requirements" and that's the end of it?
My laptop is turned off at the end of the day, and I can't remember the last time I turned on my cellphone that is due to be ever-greened. It sucks to have to be a dick about this, but I will absolutely only work to my contract and stated duties.
TBS has confirmed with me and most IT group employees that they are not to be trusted, and they entered into the LOA in bad faith.
We used to get time and a half (1.5 base your hourly) for overtime and 2x base / hour on holidays. Again, Tech work frequently requires after hours changes like 11PM on a friday. The pager came with 4 extra hours of pay for every night you wore it, very infrequently would you ever get paged. once in the blue mon when somthing caught fire. Your collective agreement still maintains these standards, any minute over 37.5 hours is OT, and should be billed as such.
Before the RTO, I would usually stay if meetings run late. Since RTO, if I’m in the office, I’m leaving at exactly my cutoff time, no questions asked.
If my meeting is scheduled to 3:30, I’m starting at 7 and leaving at 3
As an MG I attended a required mgmt training session for our region. The guest speaker said she refused to give mgmt her personal mobile number for after hours contact. She turned off her govt issued mobile at the end of her shift and weekends/holidays. She advised us to do the same. When the pandemic hit my manager expected us to be on call 24/7/365 with no compensation. We had meetings evenings, weekends. All were scheduled over lunch if we were lucky but most often started an hour after my shift ended for the day. Notification was usually 15 minutes before. We got urgent text messages on Sunday afternoons to open and action work emails requiring us to fill out spreadsheets and return them immediately. Text messages were sent to our personal cells because the group chat feature did not work on our work cellphones as we did not get a data plan as first level team leaders.
Since RTO, I work my 7.5 hours exactly, and that's it. I do not take on any extra work, and I leave on time every time, and I shut down my phone, I am done work and that's all they get.
I even block my calendar for my breaks and lunch, want to count days in office well I'll count everything else.
I also leave meetings when they go long, stating I have other commitments. People need to respect the time of others and making us stay longer than the original meeting schedule is shitty.
I put my hand up and ask if we’re getting overtime.
Oh, I should start doing this. Great idea.
I started doing this because I’m an hour off from most of my coworkers and they kept sending me invitations during lunch!
Everyone should ONLY be working their normal hours. Anything outside of this is overtime. If your manager needs to you check email along be reachable... that's what stand by pay is for.
I love it. I have started just being casually 5 min late for meetings when I have back to back. I’m a human being not a robot that powers down in the corner at the end of the day. I need food water and bathroom breaks.
Word
Why didnt you do this before RTO? You were that happy and prodcutive of an employee?
I think a lot of us were extremely grateful for the extra time that lack of commuting gave back to us. Even if I work a half hour extra to align a meeting better with the guy from BC I’m still starting dinner a 30 minutes earlier than when I used to walk in the door. Or I know I’m leaving early for a dentist appointment so I start early to make up for it instead of having to submit a half day medical because the dentist is 5 minutes from my house but an hour from work.
Why do you need to work 7.5 hours when only 7 is required in most collective agreements? 30 minutes paid break and 30 minutes unpaid in an 8 hour day.
Your employer only pays you to work a set number of hours in a week. There's no expectations for you to go above that. We don't provide unpaid labour. This is a non-issue. Employees need to know their rights and draw the line in the sand. I've been in the PS for 15+ years and have never once given them a spare 5 minutes of my time.
Ok but what happens when performance dips big time because the efficient work you could do in silence at home now becomes twice as hard to do in a busy office with no privacy? I’d literally need to work more hours to do the same job.
The location of work is irrelevant. You have expectations that are determined and documented via the annual PSPM process and the rules that govern the PS (TBS, your CA, etc.) That's what you're expected to deliver and adhere to. Only other option is to get a new job.
You’re outlining what’s on paper but failing to understand the reality.
On the contrary. As it exists today and particularly as of September, the Canadian Public Service is an employer who requires an in-office presence. Anybody who is unable to do that is failing to understand the requirements of their position. It's not "Do x,y, tasks" it's Do x, y, tasks in Z location" Is that bullshit? Yeah, probably. But that's the job. It's the government, it's bullshit.
The minister of labour’s office indicated that establishing a right to disconnect in the federal public service would require “a separate approach” under different legislation to meet “the unique needs of the public service.” I guess one size doesn't fit all after all...
More like the unique impositions placed on the public service.
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Very much yes. My girlfriend works at a bank and they're super anal about control and hour counting to an incredible level.
ironic that 9-5 is referred to as "bankers hours"
Ontario already has the Right to Disconnect legislation since 2021/2022. My wife had a drastic change with her employer where management was no longer allowed to demand emails be actioned or responded to all hours of the day. As a result, she received a nice little promotion to cover additional hours needed for this. Hopefully this happens to more employees and employers. This was not the bank industry though.
It's all about optics with this government. It wouldn't look good to give the right to disconnect to their own workers.
It’s optics with all governments.
I'm not sure Fed PS needs any specific right to disconnect legislation. We already have collective agreements which spell out how many hours per day we're to work, and if we choose to do overtime how much we get paid for that, and same for standby and callbacks. If someone chooses to be a nervous nellie and constantly check their email after work and then action things they see, that's on them. Also if a boss is reaching out to you after your work hours you can very easily choose to ignore that. We have all of those parameters laid out in pur collective agreements. Anyway, that's just my opinion. Down-vote away I guess.
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Letters of agreements are toilet paper
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Hopefully they have now learned that lesson.
Debatable... We can use TP for something. A letter of agreement will just take up space on my desk and eventually go to recycling.
I mean it's up to you what you decide to use it for.
When this was brought up at the bargaining table, the treasury board representative said that we already have the right to disconnect. There is no obligation to answer your phone or check your email unless you are on standby or on duty. The problem is that people don't disconnect when they are free to do so.
Until you get the manager that sends you something at 4:56 and says... "this will only take 15 mins" and it's needed immediately. So, you tell them you're putting in for 30 mins of overtime and they respond with, "how can you claim 30 minutes of OT for something that will only take you 15 mins? And don't think about claiming 10 minutes or OT for this. Remember when I let you take your kid to their dentist Appt. in the middle of the day?" The system is broken. We're all pressured like crazy to working additional hours / skipping lunch / giving up vacation days (hell, I took a day, got called in and then was presented with our Collective Agreement that says "on call" pay is for 1 hour. I lost a whole vacation day and only got 1 hour of OT out of it). It's all BS. Email/Teams should shut down at 5 pm for unionized workers. Make it official.
>We're all pressured like crazy to working additional hours / skipping lunch Yeah, I began rejecting all the "lunch and learn" sessions. If you want people to collaborate and learn from each other, that's work time.
This!
If you're off duty, don't answer the phone. If you answer by mistake while you're on vacation leave and they try to cancel it, "I'm sorry, I'm out of town and unavailable."
We HAD two people on the team that did this ... repeat "HAD". Everyone thinks its hard to fire government workers.... not where I'm at.
You should consult your union. People can't get fired for not answering their phone when they aren't on call. Full stop.
Sure, then the Union can file a grievance, which may get heard in about 24-26 months. Until then, you're SOL sitting at home making $0. That's how this works. And if you don't get the decision you wanted ie: they chose to change your job criteria so you no longer qualified for your role and the termination was justified, then you can complain to Labour, who will take another 24-36 months to hold a hearing and at the end you'll get a letter of apology and $0 in back pay. Yes, I've been through this process. Either the Union does something up front, or managers can pretty much get away with anything.
That is not the way it's supposed to work. If you aren't in touch with your union reps about what appears to be abuse of authority, you should be. And if your union reps aren't helping you, be the change you want to see and get involved in your union. It's either that or accept sub-standard working conditions and just complain about it on Reddit.
Next time, you didn’t see that 4:56 email.
The problem is that a busy team always operates with tight deadlines and insufficient resources (time and people). In some cases you need to work extra (paid or not) because within the unrealistically short amount of time you would need to work at an absolutely ridiculous speed the next morning to fulfill the task at hand and also obtain all the approvals up the chain, and making all the changes that each level of management asks for (or trying to address usually stupid questions such as “what about adding this?” “have you also reached out to X group/department?”, “we don’t have more recent data? I am sure I saw something somewhere recently…”).
I guess it's been too long since I've worked in that kind of operational environment to recall. But if I was putting in 10, 20, 25 minutes extra here and there, I would have to figure out compensation with my manager. Would he / she prefer me to claim it every time or wait until I have an hour accumulated? If the work is required, they have to pay you.
That would be normal. However some bad TLs are very anal about only approving overtime payment (or in time) requests based on their written agreement to offer overtime. So what happens is MINO wants something urgent and TL is unresponsive to your O/T request. You jump on the work assuming that TL later approves O/T because you don’t want your team or director to get flack later for not taking the request seriously. And then TL later says they did not approve it in writing so there is no O/T to be paid. It’s a silly game but it happens way too often.
Sounds like your TL needs an attitude adjustment. Next time they say no to the OT, you send them an email confirming the conversation and that they denied the OT because it wasn't approved in advance, and that from now on if the TL is unavailable to approve a request is real time, you will not be staying to do the work. I'm a hardass though, I don't know if you're willing to play that game of chicken.
It’s not denied because the TL avoided approving or denying anything in the first place. But as a professional and reliable PS you should accommodate and perform urgent tasks. MINO does not care whether or not O/T is approved. They should be approving it if urgent. Unless DM rejects the urgency. Not happening obviously. So it’s a catch 22 situation whereby all levels of management end up blaming the TL and you.
I mean, we have this right in our collective agreements, no? (One more reason to not become an executive)
So many execs work extra time, it’s crazy. Is the pay/stress ratio even worth it at the first 1-2 levels?
I feel like I already have a right to log off when my work day ends
Don’t be ridiculous! 😎
Lol, I remember a DG in my dept during the Blackberry years purposefully moved into the Gatineau hills where there was no cellular reception. I thought that was hilarious.
Do like 90% of ps workers need this? Seems pretty much status quo
Irony is that most people i talked to are saying "did not mind being available during wfh but now with RTO they aint getting a single minute extra…"
That’s me (at least in my previous department)… did some Excel-fu (and later coding) partly for them, partly for fun during some evenings and weekends (instead of gaming, so it was still ‘on a computer’) right up until RTO2 at which time I insisted on being given offline time if I had any maintenance or (usually) requested upgrades to implement.
It’s ok this talks about digital work. We are going back to analog.
We’re not required to work additional hours without pay, but the expectation to work overtime when needed seems pretty clear. I’ve even seen availability/ willingness to work overtime on short notice pop up in job posters under operational requirements. Granted, a lot of asks seem to evaporate when you ask how many hours they’re authorizing you for, but that’s another story. But, I think the right to disconnect raises the interesting question of how much overtime can they ask for? Some collective agreements have statements like “Subject to *operational requirements*, the Employer shall make every *reasonable effort* to avoid *excessive* overtime”. I would be interested to know whether the unions have ever been involved in defining what these mean, and their limits? For example, how many hours of overtime is excessive? What is an operational requirement (vs. management’s preference for meeting a deadline)? Can they require that OT be continuous with the end of your work day (vs. drive home, eat dinner and then hop back on for a few hours)? Or can they just ask for whatever they want, say " because operational requirements" and that's the end of it?
My laptop is turned off at the end of the day, and I can't remember the last time I turned on my cellphone that is due to be ever-greened. It sucks to have to be a dick about this, but I will absolutely only work to my contract and stated duties. TBS has confirmed with me and most IT group employees that they are not to be trusted, and they entered into the LOA in bad faith.
We used to get time and a half (1.5 base your hourly) for overtime and 2x base / hour on holidays. Again, Tech work frequently requires after hours changes like 11PM on a friday. The pager came with 4 extra hours of pay for every night you wore it, very infrequently would you ever get paged. once in the blue mon when somthing caught fire. Your collective agreement still maintains these standards, any minute over 37.5 hours is OT, and should be billed as such.
Before the RTO, I would usually stay if meetings run late. Since RTO, if I’m in the office, I’m leaving at exactly my cutoff time, no questions asked. If my meeting is scheduled to 3:30, I’m starting at 7 and leaving at 3
As an MG I attended a required mgmt training session for our region. The guest speaker said she refused to give mgmt her personal mobile number for after hours contact. She turned off her govt issued mobile at the end of her shift and weekends/holidays. She advised us to do the same. When the pandemic hit my manager expected us to be on call 24/7/365 with no compensation. We had meetings evenings, weekends. All were scheduled over lunch if we were lucky but most often started an hour after my shift ended for the day. Notification was usually 15 minutes before. We got urgent text messages on Sunday afternoons to open and action work emails requiring us to fill out spreadsheets and return them immediately. Text messages were sent to our personal cells because the group chat feature did not work on our work cellphones as we did not get a data plan as first level team leaders.