An estimated 600 federal executives will be losing their jobs due to the $5.2-billion in cuts over three years, or $20.1-billion over five years, announced in the 2012 budget. Not represented by unions, they are left to fend for themselves when their jobs get cut, and exactly what that means for them and for the public service has not been widely discussed.
“We estimate that the executive cadre will be reduced by some 600 positions. That is the estimate that it’s approximately 7.4 per cent of the executive cadre,” Treasury Board’s Chief Human Resources Officer Daphne Meredith told the Senate National Finance Committee recently.
There were 6,966 executives, 42 deputy ministers and 37 associate deputy ministers in the core public service as of 2010-2011, the time for which the most recent statistics were available. In that same time, the core public service had 282,352 people.
Salaries for an entry-level executive start at $104,600, and can reach up to $198,300 for those in the upper-most echelons, according to Treasury Board Secretariat figures.
Some executives have already received notice that they will be laid off as early as mid-June, but is hard to say where these executives are, and what they do. An estimated 18,625 people had received letters notifying them that their public service jobs may be cut as of May 11. As the main source for this figure is the federal unions, it does not likely include all, or any, affected executives.
Liberal New Brunswick Senator Pierrette Ringuette has been asking the Treasury Board Secretariat and departments to provide those details to her whenever they appear at the House Finance Committee.
“I want to see if there’s a rationale in regards to the layoffs of high-ranking executives comparatively to your service-level employees,” she explained.
So far, no one at the committee has been able to provide her with the details.
“When I asked that question to Treasury Board they had the number of letters that they had sent out, but that was about it. They didn’t know the classifications, they didn’t know the provinces of these layoffs, they didn’t know how many EX, how many DM,” she told The Hill Times.
When executives are told that their job no longer exists, they have two main options. The first is to leave the public service for the private sector. If someone decides to go that route, she will get a lump sum payment when she is notified, usually worth between 26 and 32 weeks of their pay, though she could get up to one year’s salary.
They are also eligible for severance, which is calculated as one week of pay for every year of service, up to 28 weeks.
The executives are responsible for wrangling their own Career Transition Agreement with their department. The terms of the agreement are left up to negotiation, but can include things like funding for outside employment counseling and up to $7,000 in re-training funding. An outgoing executive who is approaching retirement age but doesn’t qualify for her pension yet could also arrange to be classified as on “leave without pay,” which would allow her to keep contributing to their pension for five more years.
The average age for federal executives is 50. That number goes up the higher one goes in the executive ranks: 53.3 years for EX-04 or EX-05 level workers, 54.9 years for an associate deputy minister, and 56.1 years for a deputy minister.
If an executive decides she wants to continue her career in the public service, she is treated like other public servants who have been put on notice. Her name goes on the Public Service Commission’s priority administration list, which is a matchmaking service that lines up jobless public servants with openings in other departments.
An executive could also try and take advantage of the government’s online alternation forum. A handful of executives, almost all in the Ottawa-Gatineau area, have posted their qualifications onto the forum, in the hopes of finding someone in a similar job who would like to leave to public service. If their departments agree, the two can swap jobs, and the person who wants out will leave instead.
In the forum, executive posters include people who have briefed Cabinet, who have PhDs and top secret clearance, to others who have served on the Afghanistan Task Force or managed millions of dollars in grants.
Most posters are at the EX-01 or EX-02 levels, which is the lower end of the executive spectrum. “EX-01 Ready for a new challenge!” reads one note.
“I am an accomplished director with significant experience in briefings, policy, corporate services, complex high-dollar value procurement, program delivery and international business development,” states another worker.
Sen. Ringuette also wants the government to be more transparent about executives’ bonuses.
In 2010-2011, the government paid out $74 million in pay-at-risk and performance bonuses to 6,044 executives. The average pay out was $4,156.
At-risk pay is salary money that is held back from an executive pending a performance review, explained Ms. Meredith.
The government has tied 40 per cent of executives’ at risk pay to how well they found efficiencies in their department for the 2012 budget. When that decision was made public last fall it was not looked kindly upon by union leaders, who pointed out the irony of tying executive compensation to how well they cut other public servants’ jobs.
“It is very intriguing that first of all, these two programs of bonuses are still alive and well at the same time that massive layoffs are in the picture,” said Sen. Ringuette.
In a recent speech to the federal government’s financial management community, Treasury Board Secretary Michelle d’Auray acknowledged the tough times facing those in the public service.
“The government has asked a lot of you recently—a lot of us recently,” she said.
“We are affecting thousands of people across the federal public service, and we are affecting thousands of people who rely on some of the services that we provide. But we are also taking care of our people and the programs that we are continuing to provide, and we are seriously attempting to address these issues,” she said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Jessica Bruno
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