With unions pushing to enshrine WFH home as a right, the return-to-office power struggle hits the bargaining table
If you’ve taken an interest in the development and deployment of work-from-home models, you’ve probably been keeping tabs what’s happening with civil servants in Ottawa (and elsewhere), who were — controversially— ordered back to the office by the Treasury Board on a hybrid, two-or-three-days-a-week schedule near the end of last year.
Since Covid hit somewhere in the middle of the civil servant contract negotiation cycle, WFH has been treated as management prerogative. But now the Public Service Alliance of Canada’s (PSAC) contract is up for renewal, and it could change all that. Work-from-home is now being treated like a contract issue. That’s a new development in collective bargaining, say labour experts.
“You’re moving from something that has developed informally, because of the pandemic, to suddenly formalizing it,” said Matthias Spitzmuller, a business professor at Queen’s, speaking with the Globe and Mail. “As is sometimes the case with collective agreements, it could mean less flexibility for the worker and the organization.”
The 2022 Shaping the Future of Work in Canada Survey, conducted last fall, found that remote employees overall want to be more involved in negotiating arrangements with their employer. And yet few are: “Only half of home-based workers in Canada had been consulted about their future work arrangements,” the survey found, adding that only forty per cent felt satisfied with their input.
“That’s why PSAC is negotiating to enshrine remote work in our contracts,” reads a statement from PSAC president Chris Aylward. “So that we can set rules around how these decisions are made, so that workers have a say in their working conditions and have an avenue to advocate for themselves if they feel the policy is being applied to them unfairly.”
As strike votes commence, much hay will surely be made over the next few weeks of the wage demands — PSAC opened with a high-end 14 per cent per year demand, while the Treasury Board recently countered with a low-end two per cent per year offer. But from the outside, remote work looks to be the main ball in play. There is no doubt room for both PSAC and the Treasury Board to meet in the middle on wages ― but which way it breaks might hinge mainly on who backs down on the remote work question.
“Why not give unions something on the return to office so they reduce their 14 per cent raise demands?” asked one anonymous senior bureaucrat. “Everything is negotiable.”
Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.