Public Works and Government Services Canada, the federal paymaster and receiver-general, wants to recover two weeks pay from every public servant’s pay cheque for the next year beginning Jan. 1. All new hires will start on the new system when they begin work and would have the first two weeks of their pay withheld.
Employees will get a full, regular pay cheque for the first payday in 2014, but the next 24 payments would be reduced until the equivalent of two weeks is collected. Employees would get a one-time reduction in taxable income less the two weeks and when they leave, quit or retire will get their withheld two-week payment.
This proposed “pay in arrears” plan has triggered a blowback from unions, which want to see a business case for the change, resent they weren’t consulted, and are prepared to legally challenge the proposal if the government proceeds.
“They are using a new word with us. They ‘engage’ us now, not ‘consult’ us. Consultation is sitting down and listening to my opinion and taking that into consideration, They are moving from that to the new phrase ‘engage,’” said Chris Aylward, vice president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
A spokesperson for Treasury Board President Tony Clement said no decision has been made on the plan, but unions say they have been briefed on the proposal by Public Works and some have even publicly posted their objections on their websites.
PSAC President Robyn Benson said the move would pose a financial hardship, especially for the lower income employees who may live from cheque to cheque. A mid-level clerical worker such as a CR-4 would lose $75 on every biweekly paycheque, and a higher-paid IT worker would lose about $150 a paycheque.
But union leaders admit that in the back of their mind they question what the government has in mind for the $9 billion in cash it will recover from employees’ paycheques that it doesn’t have to spend in 2014.
“What this government is doing is clawing back from our members real money, and why — is it supposed to help pay down the deficit?” said Benson.
The unions may not have bristled so strongly had the move not come on the heels of number of moves that that are chipping away at the compensation of public servants and the power of unions. Employees are already facing the loss of severance pay, increases in pension contributions, and now the government is taking aim at banked sick leave.
“Put it this way, recovering four per cent of wages in 2014 is a four per cent reduction in salary,” said Ron Cochrane, co-chair of the National Joint Council.
A spokesperson for Treasury Board President Tony Clement said no decision has been made on the plan, which unions say they were briefed on by Public Works. The government has been talking about the move for months now.
The move is one of a number of “industry standard” payroll practices that the government will be adopting under its “new pay solution” that will change how public servants are paid. The move to “payment in arrears” is touted as providing better, timelier and more accurate processing of changes in pay rates. It would also reduce overpayments that the government has to then recover from employees.
The Conservative government built a new $300 million pay centre in Miramichi to replace the jobs lost when it shut down the gun registry – to replace its archaic, 40-year-old pay system with a new off-the-shelf system by 2015-16. The move is part of the government’s plan to upgrade its aging IT system and is supposed to transform and streamline how cheques are processed and people are paid.
The government has the largest payroll in the country, handling 300,000 employees and transactions worth $17 billion a year. The old system was bogged down by so many complicated pay rules that public servants complained they waited months, even years, for raises or overtime payments and sometimes for regular pay.
Public servants are currently paid biweekly for the work they have done, which means the cheque they receive every payday covers the 10 days just worked including the payday Wednesday.
This means pay cheques are calculated and processed before the work is actually done so they don’t reflect transactions or changes that may have occurred, such as leave without pay, resignation, termination, salary increases if promoted.
Under the new plan, the government wants to pay bureaucrats two weeks after the work is done. Public Works claims this is the industry standard and means employees will be paid for 10 days worked from a Thursday to a Wednesday that was completed two weeks earlier.
Public Works says that it has few options on how long it could take to collect the money for the changeover, and concluded spreading the recovery over a year was the least disruptive and posed the least hardship to employees.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: KATHRYN MAY
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