- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat distributed nearly 4.3 million compensation hours to workers affected by the problematic Phoenix pay system, according to data obtained by CBC news.
I worked for the federal government for 25 years. I went months at a time any time I changed jobs or got promoted not getting paid the right amount. Sometimes I wouldn’t get paid at all. The pay people always told me that it eat ok because they would eventually get it figured out. I tried multiple times to explain that I bank and my landlord wouldn’t accept that but they just shrugged. Overtime and expenses would go six months before being paid. All that time I was out of pocket. My pay had constant deduction adjustments as they tried to get past mistakes corrected.
I left the federal government on 2011 and went to work for a private company. I told my wife to anticipate a few weeks before they got my pay flowing. At the end of the next pay period they paid me, the exact amount that I eat owed. Every pay period after that I was paid exactly the right amount. When I left that company in very good terms they paid my final paycheque immediately and it was exactly correct.
When I left that company and went to work for a US company as a foreign contractor my pay was always right and always on time. That company was sold to another company and my pay was never late or wrong. We were them divested and sold to another company and my pay was always on time and always correct.
Were any other employer in the country doing what the federal government is doing it would have been charged with gross violations of labour laws. The federal government just absolves itself with a, “Tee hee. Oops.”
Were any other employer in the country doing what the federal government is doing it would have been charged with gross violations of labour laws. The federal government just absolves itself with a, “Tee hee. Oops.”
That’s the part I’ve never understood. How is it possible for any employer to not be subject to labour law and contract obligations. Why weren’t they on strike until it was fixed? It’s not like they were being paid! I remember having gone on strike because the camp cooks decided to serve something other than steak on Wednesday (steak day, as it was known).
I’ve also never understood why local managers couldn’t just cut cheques based on known wages and deductions while others work on rectifying the problems.
How is it possible for any employer to not be subject to labour law and contract obligations.
Some agreements were made to compensate. But it’s hard to take this particular employer to task too harshly as the employees own the business. The workers are the employer.
The workers are the employer.
Not in any meaningful sense. If they were, they’d for sure have found a way to pay themselves and avoid labour disputes that put them on the picket line.
If it were a small mom and pop business, maybe. You can usually find compromise when the numbers are small enough that you can sit the entire company around a table and hash out your grievances.
But we’re talking about a big business. One of the (if not the) largest businesses in the country. In big business it is really hard to get everyone on the same page at the best of times. But in this case every worker is the employer, which complicates things even more. If the accounting department says, “Nope, deal with it.” what are you going to do? Say “You’re fired” as they say “No, you’re fired!”
You’re right that being an employer doesn’t magically give you control over other people. They’re going to do what they want, even in small businesses, but especially in big businesses. If the workers don’t want to fix this, what are you going to do? It is not going to automatically fix itself. Only the workers can fix it.
What a load of nonsense. Federal employees don’t own the government any more than the average Canadian does. We pay for it but we don’t own it. The government is owned by the wealthy, the powerful, and corporations. The rest of us are just catyle being farmed for wealth. They get us in debt as early as possible and keep us in debt until the day we die and take everything we owned to pay it off.
They fuck up the workers pay because they can because they allow themselves to get away with it.