City to put freeze on hiring managers
The city of Montreal is instituting a hiring freeze on white collar and management positions to try and streamline the administration at city hall and save funds, Mayor Denis Coderre announced Wednesday. The freeze will affect about 30 per cent of the city’s 28,000 employees. It will not touch essential services like police and firefighters, or employees responsible for snow clearing, infrastructure and water services.
“In the recent electoral campaign, I pledged a reform of the municipal administration,” Coderre said. “We must take a portrait of the situation to figure out our margins, so we can institute a reform that conforms to our priorities. … A lot of Montrealers feel they’re not getting their money’s worth. It’s time to give them a sense that things are changing.”
Montreal’s bureaucracy is often criticized for having developed too many overlapping levels that are both cumbersome and costly after years of mergers and demergers. Reforming it emerged as a central theme of the last municipal election campaign. Mayoral candidate and economist Marcel Côté pledged to analyze the functions of the top 300 or 400 administrative posts at city hall and get rid of 100 of them. While he lost in his bid to become mayor, Coderre appointed Côté as an adviser on administrative reform to the city’s executive committee.
While Coderre said the freeze won’t lead to layoffs, eventual staff reductions will be made through attrition and reducing the number of external hires.
“The preparation of the 2014 budget is an occasion to examine the city’s activities and change our ways of doing things so our organization becomes more efficient,” executive committee chairman Pierre Desrochers said. “Since salaries represent 50 per cent of our budget, it’s normal that we are vigilant about the financial situation at the city.”
In a typical year the city will make about 3,000 hiring moves, he said. Changes to white collar and management posts that usually account for roughly 960 of those moves will be put on hold for an undetermined amount of time. The city is respecting the collective agreements of its unions, Desrochers added.
Montreal’s 19 boroughs are being asked to find ways to be more efficient without cutting services.