Please fix pay system: Rally cry
Civil servants protest paycheque mistakes
In March 2016, Stephen Klaver was stunned to discover his biweekly pay was $500 instead of $1,400.
The costly blunder was repeated for the next eight consecutive paycheques.
“It was an absolute nightmare,” said Klaver during a stop in Kelowna on Friday. “I couldn’t pay my rent. I’m a single dad and for four months I couldn’t take my 10-and-11-year-old daughters for weekends because I didn’t have any money to buy them food.”
Pay for the citizens services officer from Service Canada in White Rock was finally sorted out in July 2016 and he was reimbursed what he was owed.
But the damage was done. And Klaver is still bitter about the ordeal. That’s why he was one of two dozen federal government workers and union officials in Kelowna on Friday protesting chronic mistakes made by Ottawa’s Phoenix payroll system.
Since it was rolled out in February 2016, there have been 173,000 instances of inaccurate pay for 170,000 unionized federal employees under Phoenix.
Many of the mistakes are just a $5 underpayments or overpayments, but many are also in the hundreds or thousands of dollars and sometimes workers don’t get paid at all.
The problems also extend to federal employees on maternity, paternity and disability leave and pensioners.
To add insult to this injury, no one answers the toll-free phone line set up to handle Phoenix discrepancies and emails aren’t returned either, according to Klaver.
After calling every day and leaving messages for six weeks, Klaver finally heard back from someone.
It then took a further six weeks for the problem to be figured out and rectified.
“We just want the government to fix this mess and pay people accurately and on time,” said Canada Employment and Immigration Union regional vice-president Vanessa Miller.
“We’ve been fighting this fight since the Phoenix mistakes started in February 2016 and the federal government just doesn’t seem to be listening. That’s why we’re organizing protests like this at the offices of MPs.”
Friday’s protest was in front of Kelowna Lake Country MP Stephen Fuhr’s office at 1420 St. Paul St. downtown. There, the group also did a series of chants, including: Pay us for the work we do; We can’t eat an I.O.U.
Miller had emailed Fuhr asking him to meet the group Friday, but said the MP never emailed back.
When the group went into his office, it discovered Fuhr wasn’t there.
The group left some materials with the receptionist and also left stacks of Fix Phoenix Pay System and Respect Vegreville signs outside the office.
The protest was serving double duty, because the crowd was also demanding the Immigration Refugee and Citizenship Case Processing Centre not be moved 100 kilometres from Vegreville, Alta., to Edmonton.
“This federal decision is an attack on a rural community,” said Canada Employment and Immigration Union president Eddie Bourque. “The people who work at the Vegreville centre don’t want to drive over 100 kilometres to work on rural roads. We want the federal government to change its mind and reverse this decision.”