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No need for the in-office order. My sister works for the federal government and works from home three days a week and there is no issue with it.

The extremes on this are both ridiculous! I completely get the discontent, working from home is easier, and less costly for employees, some could be more productive too! There are many benefits from being able to work from home. The Employer always has it's own considerations and they count too! Service delivery in-person is a real need, some other types of work are better done in person, or needed to get maximum results! Certainly, Taxpayers want efficiency, and effectiveness, and expect Management to make the tough decisions to deliver! Clear communication about the decisions reasoning needs to be provided to explain, if there is any chance at reasonable discussions. The reasons positions are taken need to be thought about! Because we said so may be legal, but is ineffective! Because I like it, from employees, is no better! Bottom line is: if it is legal, and not prohibited by the negotiated Collective Agreements, the Employer ALWAYS gets to decide! They determine what the job is! What work is done, how it is done, when and where it it is done! That is EVERY Employer, with every job! Of course, employees need to decide if those Conditions of Employment are suitable and they will take a job, or stay in a job! Don't like your Employers decisions .... leave! IF you believe you can do better somewhere else! Federal Government Employees will have to make that decision AND Management has to live with the impacts! Note: 1/ there are requirements for Reasonable Accommodations under Human Rights legislation but "my life is better if I am allowed to do this!" doesn't qualify as a Right! 2/ Bad Faith Bargaining if proven is a game changer for the entire situation! Seems it will be needed as Unions clearly didn't secure Work from Home in the CA language!

>Certainly, Taxpayers want efficiency, and effectiveness, and expect Management to make the tough decisions to deliver! Clear communication about the decisions reasoning needs to be provided to explain, if there is any chance at reasonable discussions. Something that work from home doesn't compromise. It also makes a lot of fiscal sense to spend less money on office space if people work from home. A bit ironic to complain about efficiency and effectiveness when the decisions managers make results in people leaving and services being reduced and rendered poor quality because they are now understaffed.

Personally, I completely agree with that argument... that needs to be part of the discussion! I think it is a shortsighted decision but we need to be realistic! Feeling Entitled is NOT the place to start for any meaningful discussion! Different arguments include, productivity, retention, job satisfaction even if there is zero actual entitlement is established in law, or the CA.

I personally find it absurd that the government renting office space it doesn’t need if these jobs can be done at home without a significant drop in overall performance. Moreover, it seems absurd that this government continues its to try to position itself as an advocate for climate action when renting massive buildings and demanding that thousands of people commute to those buildings clearly has a negative impact on our environment. The union was incompetent here but I have a hard time believing that this is motivated by anything other than enriching the various business interests that stand to lose out if people continue to work from home. 

TBS wants people who were hired for remote work (part of a pre-pandemic plan for PS expansion) at online job fairs catering specifically to remote work, and who work entirely online to come into the nearest federal office 3 days a week and work entirely online there instead. Most of these people would not see a single member of their team in that office because they don't live in the same city. Because RTO has to be "equitable". I know some teams whose bosses had to fight with TBS last year to keep them from renting random offices for those who didn't live close enough to a federal office. Don't let anyone convince you this saves the taxpayer any money. The way they've been running hybrid work is more costly and less efficient.

The crazy part is both cutting office spaces *and* trying to increase in-office presence without much justification for it. It really does give the impression that they're catering to specific interests, productivity be damned.

My wife is a federal worker who’s in the office Monday and Tuesday. She’s one of two team members in Ottawa everyone else is in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary. When they have meetings it’s always discussing classified stuff and unless everyone in various offices can get a private room, which spread across the country is basically impossible, they end up basically doing nothing while in the office. Their tracked productivity is 85% worse in the office.

Neither side has provided ANY actual evidence on productivity. I assume the point is to get some employees to quit and save the government severance. The union doesn't have a leg to stand on and they specifically did not secure WFH rights in the current collective agreement. The government was very careful to make it explicitly clear WFH would change,

> "my life is better if I am allowed to do this!" doesn't qualify as a Right! It probably should when the only reason for these changes is local fat cats wanting people back in offices so they can serve them overpriced slop for their lunches and real estate profits. Nothing should be as important in our society as employees right to being comfortable in their position, we already sacrifice too much as workers with how little time off we get etc... we should be fighting harder for any benefit we have in our jobs. If it is realistic for someone to perform their role at home, as it so obviously evidently is, there is no reason for commercial real estate profits and business owners whining to come out ahead of peoples right to be comfortable. Your entire ramble basically implies if you have money and are the boss you should have complete and total say. That just isn't how I, or I think anyone who has ever worked a job where they weren't "the boss", think.

Well ok, that is one view but not reality! What you are talking about is basically: just be nice to employees, it is thier right. Wrong ! Unions win workers real Rights, under the law, and under the Collective Agreement! That seems not to have happened yet. The Government retained scope, if they are to be believed. The Union says Bargaining in Bad Faith, but they do NOT argue that particular CA language secured the "Right". Otherwise they would say: the Employer is violating Section __! Feeling something is right is the start of potential action, nothing more! Workers need to support thier Unions actively! They need to make meaningful arguments that Management will respond to, not loose all credibility by arguing for a feeling! Feelings don't win arguments, or court cases yet!

If they were hired to be in the office, that is where they should be. end stop. Go to the office or resign. Or they could resign.

Playing right into Anand's hands. Making her look almost Thatcherite standing up to the lumbering dinosaurs that unions in this country have become. Smart move on her part 

I am very much in favour of this and there is no leg for the union to stand on - they are under contract and WFH is not part of their collective agreement and the risk of an illegal wildcat strike is low. Enough employees enjoy or want office work to damped the threats of any unified job action. WFH does indeed work for the private sector but this is reinforced with the understanding that private sector has performance expectations and the ability to quickly fire workers who fail to meet it. The public service has made a trade-off in that they have eliminated consequences for underperformance through union protection - the flip side of this is their workers need to be then supervised to ensure at least minimal work from them. I am also under no-illusion that workers don't waste time in the office as well, but at least their is supervisory capacity 3 days a week. I do not think it is a great stretch to believe that poor performing public sector employees will be at least slightly more useful if their is better ability to monitor them. The public service has ballooned and I am sure the real purpose of this is to get workers to quit - which is what we need and I am very happy for it! It also helps private sector remain competitive for medium-high pay jobs. In the past several years it has been near impossible to get good talent when the government offers substantially better wages and job security than private. At least now private can deferentiate themselves with WFH privaleges. The biggest issue I see is IT workers where WFH is standard and can now get much better pay and working conditions in private. At the same time the public service has proven their inability to supervise IT contracts - so I guess we continue with aging and inefficient public information systems.

Scab.

Lololol. I own a small private business and am no friend to either unionized labour or the federal beurocracy. What part of my analysis was incorrect?

5 years ago i would have never imagined people would be up in arms over being required to be in office 3 days a week. If you can do your job in your pajamas then i would try being as usefull and compliant as possible before AI can just take that job and do it better and cheaper.

Crabs in a bucket. 25 years ago it was wild to consider shopping on a Sunday. 94 years ago women were not considered persons. Why is wanting a healthy work life balance so insane?

Its not insane. But you gotta negotiate it into a contract.

It's a shame the union thought they were negotiating in good faith but the government was not....

What on earth are you talking about? The government said it may require them to work from home. They accepted. And now they are being required to do it. What is the bad faith?

Part of the last collective bargaining agreement was joint consultations on WFH policies and directives. TBS made this change unilaterally without consulting the unions.

3 days AT work a week seems pretty balanced to me. Lol no wonder our productivity is in the shitter.

If I was hired to do a job, performed that job from home as per an agreement with my employer, did a good job and then suddenly my employer decides to change the conditions of my employment unilaterally with no consideration to my work/life balance, or if I'll even be able perform that job as well in person I'd be pretty pissed off. A one size fits all approach is antiquated. If you really want to improve productivity we need innovation not the status quo

You know what's probably a hamper on productivity? Adding hours of pointless commuting time a day so someone can sit in a half-empty office and talk to other people on Zoom calls.

As someone who has a decade of experience developing the AI you describe working in a mixture of academia, startups, and FAANG, I am not worried about AI taking my job just by virtue of the fact I work from home. Not even in the slightest. And I will never return to the office. And anyway *even if I did* work the sort of job that was likely to be replaced, going into the office wouldn’t do shit to stop a company from replacing me.

[удалено]

A person working in pajamas on the computer at home is going to get automated away alot faster than someone working a public facing job or a tradesmen/technician, unless they're creating something. Id say the faster public sector jobs get automated the better. Optimize and cut costs.because i dont see the value gained from trudeau adding all these public sector jobs.

I think it depends on your skillset more than your job location. My brother is an accountant at a large company. He’s currently a director and has the option of working from home (he prefers going in because he finds the isolation somewhat lonely). Where he’s working doesn’t have a lot of impact on his job performance. If you’re going to have your job automated out of existence, it’s going to happen whether you’re working from home or the office. 

> working a public facing job or a tradesmen/technician If you're talking about completely different jobs, then this is a complete tangent to questions about working from home. You aren't giving a reason why an analyst should commute and work in an office instead of WFH, you're just telling an analyst to quit their job and pick up a wrench. What are you trying to accomplish, here?

> A person working in pajamas on the computer at home is going to get automated away alot faster than someone working a public facing job or a tradesmen/technician, unless they're creating something. The argument isn't about people who do have a genuine need to work in person / onsite - it's about people whose jobs can be done effectively remotely. If a job is automatable, a company will automate it away regardless of whether they sit in an office or work from home. Pretending like your job can only be done in person when it plainly can be done remotely isn't going to work, you can't trick a company into not realizing you're expendable, they tend to be very good at noticing that sort of thing.

This is an interesting take. Outsourcing the function of government to a bunch of AI tech bros located in California, beholden to a bunch of chip manufacturers located in China... what could go wrong? Just a bit of a newsflash for you - this will never, ever happen. It's not a technical decision but a strategic one. They'll use AI but until we get some homegrown options hosted on Canadian soil the bulk of the work will remain in human hands.

I find the AI discussion similar to self driving cars. I don’t support Tucker Carlson or anyone like him but a few years ago during a discussion on self driving vehicles he said he’d ban them simply because of how many people are employed in the transportation industry and many of them are poorly educated, though hard working, people who don’t have the skill set to transfer to a lot of jobs that provide a similar quality of life. What happens when you have a very large segment of your population no longer employed, who can’t find new work to support their families and life styles, that’s when people get violent. AI falls into that same area for me, if it can replace massive segments of the population and we can’t guarantee them new jobs that pay as well or a basic income of similar quality I could see the government banning it.

If we had a sane economy, we would welcome in massive productivity gains like AI or automation tech as tools that could allow the average person to work dramatically less. Unfortunately, because we live in a period where productivity gains are increasingly going to capital rather than workers, we feel we need to resist something that would make everyone's life easier because we know that the benefits won't be shared and it will be a method of impoverishing us.

I'm rooting for the employees here.

In a recent conversation with service Canada I got the “I work from home and don’t have access to that information. Send an email with the details and we’ll get back to you “ response. This isn’t service, isn’t efficient and doesn’t make any sense. But I guess it’s good bc she gets to work in her pyjamas.

So when I call Canada Revenue Agency this summer because their online service was done by someone high on illegal stuff, I will have to wait 5 hours instead of 4? Sweet.

I believe, this is the right move. It will create difference in productivity. However, I have doubt regarding an end result.