PS contract language to be streamlined
Streamlined language could be big step forward
This is how serious the federal government’s Phoenix pay mess has become.
Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough earlier this month asked federal unions to help expedite a fix by simplifying contract language in dozens of collective agreements.
Debi Daviau, president of the 57,000-member Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, revealed Friday that she agreed.
In doing so, however, she offered one important caveat — that any revisions to PIPSC’s collective agreements “not result in any loss of pay.”
Her statement is posted on the union’s website.
Daviau also wanted to make it clear that the 80,000 or so pay rules negotiated over the years by a multitude of federal public service unions aren’t to blame for the botched rollout of the new Phoenix pay system.
(This is also the position of the government’s largest union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which has yet to weigh in on whether to open its negotiated contracts).
“It is frankly absurd and offensive to accuse collective agreements of confounding the current pay system,” Daviau noted. “The old pay system, built in-house by our members and still used in a few workplaces, managed such changes for 40 years without this kind of catastrophic failure.”
Indeed, several independent assessments of the $310-million Phoenix pay project — including one earlier this week by Auditor General Michael Ferguson — concluded that while government pay rules are many and complicated, that is not what triggered the avalanche of delayed and erroneous pay transactions now clogging the system.
Rather, these reports noted, the fault lay with inadequate testing combined with the decision to trim the number of pay advisers even before Phoenix was launched early in 2016.
So why bother reopening the collective agreements now? At this point, nearly two years into the new system with no end in sight to the problems, union leaders can’t afford to just point fingers at the government.
Streamlining contract language should be a relatively painless fix, financially speaking. This is because the collective agreements are riddled with different definitions for a wide variety of pay and benefit items — standardizing on common terms could reduce the likelihood of mishandled transactions, perhaps significantly.
It would also go some distance toward Daviau’s longer-term mission, which is to push government into building an entirely new pay system down the road, thus severing all links with the egregious experiment called Phoenix.