You’re fired! (unless you’re a public servant)
INCOMPETENCE ISN’T ENOUGH TO GET SACKED
Last month, two Toronto Police officers allegedly ate stolen cannabis edibles while on duty and became so high that one of them ended up in a tree.
If these same Toronto cops worked at a railyard or an oil drilling platform, this kind of behaviour would have caused them to be promptly fired and escorted off the site. However, they were merely suspended pending an investigation, and if history is any guide, they will almost certainly keep their jobs.
Canadians are correct to assume that it is almost impossible to fire a public employee for incompetence, even if they’re carrying a sidearm while too stoned to remember their own name.
This story isn’t trying to pick on cops, bureaucrats, teachers or other public servants. Nevertheless, below are a few reasons why those fields are so consistently unable to terminate incompetent and even dangerous employees.
THE DATA DOESN’T LIE: BASICALLY NOBODY IN GOVERNMENT GETS FIRED
A 2010 federal report provided a rare window into the number of federal employees who get fired each year. Over a 10- year period starting in 1999, an average of 127 employees per year were subject to a “dismissal,” which indicates that they were specifically fired instead of being laid off. For context, by the end of that period the federal public service was employing more than 250,000 people. In one particularly notable year, 2000, only 77 of the country’s 211,925 federal workers were fired (a rate of only 0.036 per cent). “Usually, it has to be so outrageous that it’s difficult not to deal with it; ( employees) show up drunk or aren’t showing up,” said Donald Savoie, an expert in public administration at Université de Moncton. In a 2016 report the right- leaning Fraser Institute dug up Statistics Canada data and concluded that private- sector employees are fired at a rate seven times higher than their government counterparts.
THERE ARE FEW INCENTIVES TO REMOVE A BAD EMPLOYEE
Consider the case of an Ontario principal who wants to fire an incompetent teacher. “I know of principals ( a very small f ew) who have documented and dismissed an incompetent teacher; most would not do it twice,” Barrie Bennett, a teacher development researcher at the University of Toronto, wrote in an email. It’s an all- consuming task to fire a public employee, and there are few incentives to do it; no bonuses, no praise from superiors and no increases to operational budgets. Often, the easier option is simply to shuffle an underperforming employee somewhere where they will do the least damage. “They just go in a corner and hide and become demoralized and bitter and lose their soul in many ways, but they survive,” said Donald Savoie.
PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS ARE PARTICULARLY AGGRESSIVE AT PROTECTING POSITIONS
Howard Levitt is a leading Canadian employment lawyer. He told the National Post he has struck many deals with private sector unions that negotiated layoffs in exchange for reasonable buyout packages. But the public sector union is a different animal. A “precognition is that they have jobs for life,” Levitt said. And indeed, given the statistics, that precognition is often correct. As a result, union representatives can hit the negotiating table confident in the knowledge that they never have to consider the possibility of seeing a member terminated. “Severance is never an option,” said Levitt.
IT CAN BE HARD TO PROVE INCOMPETENCE IN A GOVERNMENT JOB
It’s relatively easy to fire an incompetent delivery driver. Even if the employee takes his case to an arbitrator, the employer merely has to counter with measurable evidence that the driver missed deliveries, wasted time or alienated customers. But performance is a harder thing to measure in many government jobs. A bad cop is still technically patrolling a neighbourhood. A painfully slow Indigenous Affairs bureaucrat is still technically processing paperwork. A negligent child protective services agent is still technically getting kids into foster homes. If a manager decides to embark on the epic odyssey of removing a government employee, he is going to have to prove that the employee’s incompetence is doing tangible damage. Unless the employee is showing up drunk and assaulting people, this is hard to do.
THERE IS NEVER AN ECONOMIC RECKONING
In 1 97 7, Canada counted 74,043 fires. In 2014, there were only 38,844. Despite a dramatic reduction in fires, however, many Canadian municipalities have seen a marked increase in the number of firefighters on their payroll. In industries that are subject to market conditions, it’s usually unsustainable to maintain jobs in the face of less work. No amount of job protection could protect a B.C. logger from a plunging timber market or a Newfoundland fisherman from an ocean depleted of cod. However, except in catastrophic cases such as Greece or Venezuela, these sorts of real- world pressures generally don’t exist in the public sector. In a private company that was unwilling or unable to remove unproductive employees, financial pressures would ultimately force them to take action. But in agencies backed by the public treasury, ranks of underproductive em- ployees can be maintained for decades. Just ask one of the Toronto Transit Commission ticket- takers earning more than $100,000.
ALL THESE INCOMPETENT EMPLOYEES AROUND CAN BE DANGEROUS
The inability to remove reckl ess or negligent employees from a workplace can inevitably have dangerous consequences. Innumerable examples exist of Canadian police being returned to duty despite criminal convictions. A 2012 Toronto Star investigation found evidence of border agents and prison guards being allowed to keep their jobs despite convictions for violent crimes. A 2016 CBC investigation found that school boards were almost helpless to fire dangerous or predatory teachers, even an Ontario teacher who repeatedly got 12-year-old students to smear themselves with food for his sexual gratification. The absolute worst case scenario, however, arguably comes from Hawaii. The state was recently subjected to a false alert of incoming nuclear missiles that was due entirely to human error from an employee with a lengthy history of incompetence. For 10 years, the employee had been a “source of concern” who had “confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions.” The fiasco finally sent the employee packing, but as the Washington Post noted, “it took a national embarrassment to dislodge him from his job.”
IT DOESN’T NEED TO BE THIS WAY
A series of 2011 case studies by the left-leaning Centre for American Progress concluded that public schools do dramatically better when management and unions drop their adversarial relationship and work on churning out better teachers — even if that means getting some of them fired. “Districts and their unions did make difficult decisions to not support retaining ineffective teachers,” it concluded. Teacher development expert Barrie Bennett pointed to the example of Western Australia, where he said teachers unions have broken with the negative reputation held by many of their North American counterparts. “They DO NOT want to be seen as an organization that protects incompetent teachers,” Bennett wrote in an email. “Some unions really ‘ get it’ but there is still so much going on ( regarding) politics and personalities that too often get in the way.”