Federal Government & Union spar over returning to office

[childs56]

Why would folks become contractors if they WFH vs at the office?

It depends on work agreements and terms of employment,.

No one is taking classified stuff home. CSNI, etc are all at the office as per pre-pandemic.

People are taking classified (not top secret) information home, brief cases have gone missing from CRA people. Data breeches have happened from other home sources. It seems small and insignificant until we actually hook that person into "secure network" dealing with sensitive personal information from home. Where monitoring the internet connection may not be feasible.

 

[childs56]

A VPN is a secure line, that’s what it means. Nobody actually uses paper for ‘paperwork’, it’s digital, so there’s nothing to put into a safe. You use your issued cellphone.

So every employee who works for the Government has a "issued phone" a issued computer? Many people use paper work still along with hard drives and memory sticks.

 

[Remius]

The government has some strange rules about working. Especially when you are not in a office setting on a work site.

None of which changes one’s employment status. Please let me know what strange rule you are speaking of that suddenly changes someone’s employment status?

It is harder then one thinks especially when dealing with protected material. Storage requirements would be hard to meet as would audits of such property and material.

No it isn’t.

It would and does change. Legally if you are using your house for business purposes it changes your home insurance, liability etc. It also changes taxation on your place.

No it does not. You are confusing using your home for a business as opposed to just working from home. Nothing gets taxed on your place as a result. You do gain some tax credits though like anyone else working from home.

These are not average employees, these are government employees who are responsible to handle sensitive material. Working from home should not be the norm. I don't want my personal information hanging out in some ones home office where they can openly share it with others especially without less chance of being caught.

Having sensitive material at home is not the norm though. I’m not sure why you think all Public Servants are dealing with sensitive material at their house Those that do are are on site in the office. There are procedures if anything needs to leave the office physically just like before.

 

[Remius]

It depends on work agreements and terms of employment,.

No it does not. It’s called a telework agreement. Your status as contractor, term, casual or indeterminate is not determined by your work location not does it magically change based on that.

People are taking classified (not top secret) information home, brief cases have gone missing from CRA people. Data breeches have happened from other home sources. It seems small and insignificant until we actually hook that person into "secure network" dealing with sensitive personal information from home. Where monitoring the internet connection may not be feasible.

Security breeches can and will happen. Just like before, just like they happen at the office. That’s why there are rules, policies and procedures to follow.

We use a VPN. All of this existed before the pandemic. Anything I do over that can monitored by my employer.

 

[Remius]

So every employee who works for the Government has a "issued phone" a issued computer? Many people use paper work still along with hard drives and memory sticks.

If it’s required for them to work then yes.

 

[brihard]

The government has some strange rules about working. Especially when you are not in a office setting on a work site.

It is harder then one thinks especially when dealing with protected material. Storage requirements would be hard to meet as would audits of such property and material.

It would and does change. Legally if you are using your house for business purposes it changes your home insurance, liability etc. It also changes taxation on your place.

These are not average employees, these are government employees who are responsible to handle sensitive material. Working from home should not be the norm. I don't want my personal information hanging out in some ones home office where they can openly share it with others especially without less chance of being caught.

You’ll be happy to know that physical and information security policies and practices made all of this easy to sort out quite some time ago.

Also, frankly, if someone wants to sneak out sensitive info, they’re going to find a way, whether in office or WFH. However, any organization I know of limits what’s available to work with remotely. While I believe the US has experimented with classified remote work (I think up to secret?) that is not, to the best of my knowledge in any way shape or form done in Canada. Thinking back to when I was with CAF, federal Protected B would be the most that could be worked on remotely, and even that would generally be processing only, with storage on a network account or approved encrypted storage device.

Although I personally work in person at the office, during the pandemic I had brief periods of working from home on information that could certainly be considered ‘sensitive’ (though at a ‘designated’ level, not ‘classified’), and we were well set up to be able to do that securely via VPN. And nearly everything I do was electronic- verified Adobe e-signatures are as good as ink now. And yes, in my job function, everyone gets a work laptop and cell phone. That’s not hard to do.

You can sleep more soundly; these are all issues that have been hashed over and resolved through appropriate policies and equipment.

 

[Brad Sallows]

An employer can set conditions for the physical environment (eg. ergonomic requirements for chair and desk, surge protection for employer-provided electronic equipment, presence of fire extinguisher). The cost can be left to the employee; subject to tax guidelines, it can be claimed. Or the employee might opt to continue commuting to an office and paying those costs instead.

My employment status never changed. I bought a Husky workbench from Home Depot, put a Vari-Desk on top of it, and acquired a comfy office chair. I drank coffee without the stale-sour-sat-in-the-pot flavour and made lunches to suit myself every day. I recovered two hours of former commuting time for about 90+% of my working days. I played whatever music I pleased without the inconvenience of wearing a headset. I got about 55 minutes of useful work done for each hour spent in virtual meetings.

I am amazed at the people who keep wanting to see the glass half-empty over this.

 

[brihard]

An employer can set conditions for the physical environment (eg. ergonomic requirements for chair and desk, surge protection for employer-provided electronic equipment, presence of fire extinguisher). The cost can be left to the employee; subject to tax guidelines, it can be claimed. Or the employee might opt to continue commuting to an office and paying those costs instead.

My employment status never changed. I bought a Husky workbench from Home Depot, put a Vari-Desk on top of it, and acquired a comfy office chair. I drank coffee without the stale-sour-sat-in-the-pot flavour and made lunches to suit myself every day. I recovered two hours of former commuting time for about 90+% of my working days. I played whatever music I pleased without the inconvenience of wearing a headset. I got about 55 minutes of useful work done for each hour spent in virtual meetings.

I am amazed at the people who keep wanting to see the glass half-empty over this.

Some shitty micro managers become shitty macro managers.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

You’ll be happy to know that physical and information security policies and practices made all of this easy to sort out quite some time ago.

Also, frankly, if someone wants to sneak out sensitive info, they’re going to find a way, whether in office or WFH. However, any organization I know of limits what’s available to work with remotely. While I believe the US has experimented with classified remote work (I think up to secret?) that is not, to the best of my knowledge in any way shape or form done in Canada. Thinking back to when I was with CAF, federal Protected B would be the most that could be worked on remotely, and even that would generally be processing only, with storage on a network account or approved encrypted storage device.

Although I personally work in person at the office, during the pandemic I had brief periods of working from home on information that could certainly be considered ‘sensitive’ (though at a ‘designated’ level, not ‘classified’), and we were well set up to be able to do that securely via VPN. And nearly everything I do was electronic- verified Adobe e-signatures are as good as ink now. And yes, in my job function, everyone gets a work laptop and cell phone. That’s not hard to do.

You can sleep more soundly; these are all issues that have been hashed over and resolved through appropriate policies and equipment.

Long before WFH became the cool covid trend. We had a lady in my office who had brown nosed successfully into WFH. Except she was working from her boyfriends home in Washington State and working on Cabinet Confidential documents and took Secret/Top Secret documents across the border to work on. I warned our Regional Director on the risk of this, but got the brushoff. I really, really wished she had been searched one day by the US Border Patrol and caught with the documents. Because they would likely phone Foreign Affairs and ask; "Does so and so have authority to take these docs cross the border?" and the answer would be "No". It would have been joyful to watch as her boss throw her under the bus to save themselves from their own lack of common sense.

 

[Navy_Pete]

An employer can set conditions for the physical environment (eg. ergonomic requirements for chair and desk, surge protection for employer-provided electronic equipment, presence of fire extinguisher). The cost can be left to the employee; subject to tax guidelines, it can be claimed. Or the employee might opt to continue commuting to an office and paying those costs instead.

My employment status never changed. I bought a Husky workbench from Home Depot, put a Vari-Desk on top of it, and acquired a comfy office chair. I drank coffee without the stale-sour-sat-in-the-pot flavour and made lunches to suit myself every day. I recovered two hours of former commuting time for about 90+% of my working days. I played whatever music I pleased without the inconvenience of wearing a headset. I got about 55 minutes of useful work done for each hour spent in virtual meetings.

I am amazed at the people who keep wanting to see the glass half-empty over this.

I'm similarly mystified; three months ago they were going on about how effective we've been working from home and how productivity has gone up, and now it's all of a sudden it's the reverse. Some jobs can do remote work, some can't, others need a mix of both. If someone has been doing their job for two years remotely, baffles me that suddenly can't be done. We all have a few years of PERs and PSPAs that say otherwise.

Each time I've gone into the office so far I've gotten very little actual work done, but maybe that will get better in time as it becomes more routine. Still, the previously two hour round trip commute is more like 3, costs have skyrocketed across the board, and there is no PLD or raises in our future, so if an employer can save the employee time and money with remote work and still get the work done why not?

I don't mind commuting in for things that need to be done in person, but I'm going to be awfully annoyed to have to spend a few extra hours of my day going back and forth to a building where the bulk of my job is calling people outside the area or working on my laptop. Conversely if I'm going in in person, I'm going to make the most out of it and spend the bulk of my time doing in person things, not working on my laptop, so the backlog of that work will just get worse.

It's pretty straightforward as I have a pretty niche skill set in wide demand, so definitely piling onto the existing list of reasons to pull the pin and go work somewhere else, which may include consulting as a subcontractor at a much higher rate than what I currently get paid. Ironically that would probably mean I'd be able to do what is supposed to be my primary job, vice a bunch of other work covering for vacancies.

 

[brihard]

Long before WFH became the cool covid trend. We had a lady in my office who had brown nosed successfully into WFH. Except she was working from her boyfriends home in Washington State and working on Cabinet Confidential documents and took Secret/Top Secret documents across the border to work on. I warned our Regional Director on the risk of this, but got the brushoff. I really, really wished she had been searched one day by the US Border Patrol and caught with the documents. Because they would likely phone Foreign Affairs and ask; "Does so and so have authority to take these docs cross the border?" and the answer would be "No". It would have been joyful to watch as her boss throw her under the bus to save themselves from their own lack of common sense.

That idiot was flirting with a S. 4 Security of Information Act offense. And the boss was definitely breaching a lot of policy by failing to act.

 

[dimsum]

I'm similarly mystified; three months ago they were going on about how effective we've been working from home and how productivity has gone up, and now it's all of a sudden it's the reverse. Some jobs can do remote work, some can't, others need a mix of both. If someone has been doing their job for two years remotely, baffles me that suddenly can't be done. We all have a few years of PERs and PSPAs that say otherwise.

Each time I've gone into the office so far I've gotten very little actual work done, but maybe that will get better in time as it becomes more routine. Still, the previously two hour round trip commute is more like 3, costs have skyrocketed across the board, and there is no PLD or raises in our future, so if an employer can save the employee time and money with remote work and still get the work done why not?

I don't mind commuting in for things that need to be done in person, but I'm going to be awfully annoyed to have to spend a few extra hours of my day going back and forth to a building where the bulk of my job is calling people outside the area or working on my laptop. Conversely if I'm going in in person, I'm going to make the most out of it and spend the bulk of my time doing in person things, not working on my laptop, so the backlog of that work will just get worse.

It's pretty straightforward as I have a pretty niche skill set in wide demand, so definitely piling onto the existing list of reasons to pull the pin and go work somewhere else, which may include consulting as a subcontractor at a much higher rate than what I currently get paid. Ironically that would probably mean I'd be able to do what is supposed to be my primary job, vice a bunch of other work covering for vacancies.

I thought this policy is for DND civilians and federal public servants, not CAF members?

 

[Navy_Pete]

I thought this policy is for DND civilians and federal public servants, not CAF members?

It is, but in a mixed unit try and have a single approach. I'd also be a pretty shitty supervisor telling the folks that I work with they need to go into work while working from home full time.

I suspect there will be some moderation when the holidays are over but probably a pretty good example of TBS flexing what they think is their biceps when it's actually their glutes and they are cutting of their own oxygen.

 

[dimsum]

It is, but in a mixed unit try and have a single approach. I'd also be a pretty shitty supervisor telling the folks that I work with they need to go into work while working from home full time.

This may sound dumb, but what are the consequences if you (as a military member) just tell your civilian subordinates to WFH if it's much better to do so?

A stern talking-to?

 

[Humphrey Bogart]

Same. With a wife working from home, and multiple dogs (with terrible work ethic), home is distracting for me. Plus at work we can’t bring our cell phones into my office, so there’s that too. I’ve worked from the office almost entirely throughout COVID. That said I also see why the flexibility is amazing for a lot of people, and I have plenty of coworkers who’ve worked very productively from home.

As much as I make fun of people working from home. I couldn't do it. I'm an extrovert and work from home would probably make me super depressed.

 

[Navy_Pete]

This may sound dumb, but what are the consequences if you (as a military member) just tell your civilian subordinates to WFH if it's much better to do so?

A stern talking-to?

I'm not sure, I guess I'll find out in April!

Will find out what is required for the exception when I go back in Jan, as we just hired someone for a civilian position explicitly for remote work from out of area. I think it was part of the letter of offer as well so should be good, but I'm sure there will be some stupidity anyway.

We also have someone in uniform working from out of province, which was a much better option than an empty billet, but that actually was pretty easy to get approved, and nothing special is required after that.

I just finished a Masters mostly remotely, with about two months total of TD to get the experiments done, all of which was approved pre-COVID, so if I can do that a normal desk job shouldn't be rocket surgery.

 

[dapaterson]

No one has defined "how" the count will be done of 2/3 days per week. Is that "100-150 days per year in the office"?

The concept touted by TBS of "local co-working spaces" so you can have a bunch of people from other departments with nothing to do with your work surrounding you, and creating greater distraction, is certainly "interesting".

Frankly, it all reads like a plan to keep pouring unnecessary federal spending into real estate.

 

[Photopilot]

In my day job, I work for the Government of Ontario. We were told to go into the office 3 days a week, and you have the option of working at another Government office location. Sounds good right? Wrong. You are only allowed to work at some locations. I live in Guelph and the local offices are a 10 minute drive, 20 minute bus ride or a brisk 40 minute walk. I am only allowed to work in a remote office in Hamilton, Oshawa or 3 other locations in Toronto, none of which are any closer. The closest ministry office for the ministry I work for is in Milton, and I am still not allowed their because you need a vulnerable sector security check. I was willing to pay for that myself to save me commuting time but no they won't allow that either.

So I am still commuting in to Downtown Toronto. The joys of government work!

 

[brihard]

probably a pretty good example of TBS flexing what they think is their biceps when it's actually their glutes and they are cutting of their own oxygen.

 

[Navy_Pete]

No one has defined "how" the count will be done of 2/3 days per week. Is that "100-150 days per year in the office"?

The concept touted by TBS of "local co-working spaces" so you can have a bunch of people from other departments with nothing to do with your work surrounding you, and creating greater distraction, is certainly "interesting".

Frankly, it all reads like a plan to keep pouring unnecessary federal spending into real estate.

Don't forget local spending on restaurants etc; that seems to be the big driver here in the NCR. It's entirely political pandering, but they are trying to sell it as efficiency or collaboration. It's the lying about it that really bothers me.

Meanwhile they are still trying to cut travel if it can be done remotely, and if I can collaborate on something complicated with a number of different NATO allies/5 eyes across however many timezones (10?) sure I can figure out how to do that in my day job. Otherwise piss off and stop requiring me to jump through 10 hours of hoops to meet up with other specialists and work on something complex.