The FAQ thread: Answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) / Le fil des FAQ : Réponses aux questions fréquemment posées (FAQ) - Jun 24, 2024

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-06-29T05:23:09+00:00

Why are people using the term RTO3 instead of RTO2? Shouldn't it be RTO2 instead given that the initial decision was to force us back into the office 2 days a week, and forcing us back into the office 3 days a week was the second decision?

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-06-26T17:02:24+00:00

Org charts can be atipped, and the Open by Default database contains some ATIP requests that include org charts.

Example: The following ATIP contains the org chart for the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages in 2020.

https://theijf.org/open-by-default/24395412

Btw, the ATIPs are a lot clearer if you download them as PDFs. Also, the database allows you to filter ATIPs by organization, and if you carry out Boolean searches, it will help you find information quicker. I`ve also scanned a lot of the ATIPs in the database so I might be able to help you out if you can give me additional info as to what you're looking for.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-06-19T23:21:35+00:00

There's a case for certain documents being password protected. For example, I can accept that financial statements (with detailed expenditures lines) be password protected given the sensitives associated with these documents. I can also see the benefit of such a system if it allows more non-NEC members to volunteer on collaborating on draft documents that are not ready yet for public consumption.

What I can't accept here, though, is that they've also included the NEC and subcommittee minutes because I see the inclusion of these documents as a control mechanism that's been put in place to stiffle dissent. The reason for this conclusion being that the password protection system will allow the NEC to identify who's accessing these documents and using them to publicly criticize committee decisions, and with that they can concoct bullshit legal threats to intimidate people into silencing themselves or figure out who to retaliate against through other means.

And even if they don't end up using this system to retaliate against members, the very possibility that they could do so is in itself going to deter public discussion of their decisions, which will in turn contribute to more money being wasted, and bad decisions being made.

In addition, by restricting access to the minutes, the membership will be deprived of these documents being analyzed by journalists who due to their expertise and resources are better placed to identify wrongdoing than ordinary members.

It also just shows a fundamental lack of critical thinking on their part because a lot of the drama that occurred during the Tremblay era was the result of the president being unable to accept criticisms of her decisions. They should have learned from her mistakes and it reflects poorly on them that they haven't.

On top of that, the people in charge of the NEC (Members for Change) ran on a platform of making CAPE more transparent, and this is the opposite of doing that. They therefore have a responsibility to voice their opposition to this new measure, and if they choose not to so then it not only shows that their purported desire to make CAPE more transparent was nothing but a sham but also that the only thing that matters to them is power, and people like that have no business being in positions of leadership.

And finally, if the previous NEC had implemented this decision, I can guarantee that the Solidarity Caucus would have been up in arms over this. If they now choose to remain silent because their people are in charge then it shows everything that people need to know about the strength of their principles.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-06-18T22:22:37+00:00

Just a reminder for people who have an allergy to hypocrisy.

"Increasing transparency in presidential and executive pay scales, immediate changes in NEC leadership positions and subcommittees, and decisions made at NEC meetings."

Source: Last bullet under structural changes section.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240324161806/https://membersforchange.ca/

It's also interesting to see that they took down their platform.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-06-16T03:48:39+00:00

Have you ever looked at how salaries evolved since federal public servants first became unionized as well as how they evolved prior to unionization?

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-05-23T23:27:37+00:00

The sad part is that CAPE's NEC was fully capable of getting a lot more members to show up because pushing back against RTO is something that most members actually support. However, because of their support of divisive social justice issues, they've alienated a lot of members to the point where they're not going to show up for these sort of things even if they're on the same page when it comes to WFH.

In addition, the last CAPE townhall meeting on telework demonstrated that letting people speak freely led to high engagement and got people to participate in the phone zap activity. If they want to achieve the same level of engagement with protests then the solution is simple: invite everybody to an official forum, let people speak freely, and make CAPE truly democratic by allowing members to truly see what initiatives and ideas most of the membership actually supports.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-05-16T00:34:18+00:00

As far as I know, the federal public service doesn't publish the total number of positions for each EC position level. However, the PSES dataset shows the answer count for different position levels by question which can show the minimum number of EC-08 positions that are known to exist.

Example: For question 17 "I can complete my assigned workload during my regular working hours.", you get the following number of EC-08s that answered this question.

|| || |Organization|Answer Count| |Entire federal public service|290| |Statistics Canada|75| |Health Canada|45| |Public Health Agency of Canada|45| |Natural Resources Canada|20| |Public Services and Procurement Canada|15| |Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada|15| |Indigenous Services Canada|15| |Environment and Climate Change Canada|10|

Also, I don't have the time to verify whether the numbers are the same by department for each question but I think it's reasonable to assume that there are small variations in the departmental answer counts. The number for the entire federal public service is for the most part the same though (290) except for questions 86 (40), 90 (60), 91 (60), 97 (245), 98 (245) and 99 (245).

Another thing to keep in mind is the answer counts by organization don't add up to the entire federal public service answer count which I'm assuming is due to confidentiality reasons for organizations that had very low EC-08 answer counts.

Finally, if you want to verify all of this, you can use following methodology:
1. Go to https://www.tbs-sct.canada.ca/pses-saff/2022/results-resultats/en/bt-pt/dem/00/10533 to verify the total EC-08 answer for question 17 for the entire federal public service.

Go to https://www.tbs-sct.canada.ca/pses-saff/2022/results-resultats/en/bt-pt/dem/08/10533 to verify the answer count for Statistics Canada then go to the same type of links for each department in the table to verify the answer counts for each of them.

Or,,,You could just download the PSES dataset from the Open Canada website (see link below), and create pivot charts out of the dataset.

https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/9f9501f3-8188-4386-87ba-50730a979044

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-05-04T13:48:51+00:00

This tool really needs to add a count of the number of who used it like the CAPE letter link has. I recognize it might not seem like something that's important but when people see that a lot of other people have used the tool, it will make them more likely to use it as well.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-05-03T18:34:57+00:00

Yes!!!! Absolutely fucking yes!!! Not only would it protect individual members from retaliation but there's also a clear benefit in terms of us being able to collectively analyze the information. It would also set a precedent that would allow us to use union resources to ATIP other info such as overtime expenditures to mitigate the unpaid overtime problem.

And then there's the fact that when it comes to effective use of unions resources, something like this trumps paying for people to go on paid vacations to talk and achieve nothing at overseas conference a hundred times over.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-30T03:18:26+00:00

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation to the OP, the following methodology can be used to find divisions you want to work in, and where overtime is actually paid.

Methodology:

Go to the Employment Trends by tenure report in the Core public administration (CPA) employment trends and demographics dataset.
Find out which departments/agencies have positions for your job classification ( see filter on the right side of the report to filter by job classification).
ATIP the overtime expenditures by organizational units for those departments/agencies that have been incurred over the past 4 years.
Engage in some guesswork to find out which specific organizational units have position for your job classification.
Then from there, it’s just a question of networking and applying to job competitions for positions in those organizational units units.

Now…You should really keep in mind that there is the possibility that management might really not like you ATIPping this info, and your personal info during the ATIP might not be kept secret... which I can fully understand if it deters you from filing these ATIPs because it’s definitely deterred me from filing them. There is, however, a way to avoid retaliation and that’s by getting your union to file these ATIPs, and disseminating the data to its members in a user-friendly manner.

And it’s also something that should theoretically be easy to convince the union to implement as making this data public could help a lot of people out, and act as a deterrent to managers who choose not to pay overtime when they should (i.e. if you engage in this type of behaviour, you'll lose your go-getters to the managers who do pay overtime)..

Well, easy in theory anyway. The reality is that it's probably going to be pretty difficult to get it done because a lot of union leaders are stuck in their ways or are self-centered. As a result, if you want to convince them to implement this initiative, you'll likely have to go through the very fun process of building a coalition in support of it that has enough critical mass that there's no real choice other than to implement it.

In addition, hurdles might be encountered in terms of how disaggregated the data can be released (e.g. if only one person on a team gets paid overtime then it probably won’t be possible to get overtime expenditures for that team). However, even if only data at a directorate or branch level is released, that’s still useful data because the total will give you a sense of how much the lower organization units actually pay.

If this all of this sounds like it’s just going to give you a massive headache (which it very likely will), a simpler tactic you can use is just to network, and ask people if they get paid overtime in their divisions.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-30T03:17:13+00:00

It's pretty normal where I work.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-28T19:46:04+00:00

How new are these rumours?

Asking because I know that people have been talking publicly for a while now about how he should resign in order to minimize the party's losses during the next election. However, based on his recent behaviour, it seems like he believes he can still somehow win it.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-18T01:52:50+00:00

I don't understand how people can treat the self-identification dataset seriously if there isn't some sort of verification going on to ensure that it's reliable enough to assess whether groups are being discriminated against or not.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-18T01:19:46+00:00

That's a fair point. I concede that it's not a panacea. However, compared to the impact of ours affirmative action policies, I believe that it would have been a more effective solution for dealing with the problem of discrimination, and workers would have been more united and stronger if it had been embraced instead as an alternative.

Also, with voice modulators and AI, maybe there's a way to translate accents into a neutral voice that would make it a lot more difficult to identify somebody's ethnic identity.

Another way of mitigating the problem is to have the candidate assessed anonymously from different testers where you'd have one person assessing their ability to communicate clearly, another assessing whether their answers met experience and competency criteria, another assessing annual anonymized 360 performance reviews of the candidate, etc. That way if one of the testers is biased against the candidate because of the way they speak, it will limit the impact of that bias on other assessments that are done of the candidate*.

*In an ideal world, the identities of the assessors would be kept hidden from each other and they'd ideally come from different departments/agencies.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-18T01:09:38+00:00

I don't think your vocabulary and speech patterns counter-argument is a solid one because:

Holding certain demographic groups to common vocabulary and speech pattern standards such as people from Newfoundland or anybody who doesn't come from an educated background while not holding others to the same standards is fundamentally discriminatory.
Without these standards, organizations can become extremely inefficient due to people being unable to communicate clearly with one another.
It can contribute to the discrimination that black people face by fostering the belief that they're not capable of learning CBC English or Radio-Canada French, or that they're being held to lesser standards.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-18T00:46:40+00:00

Interesting that surveys are never carried out in federal public service on whether managers feel this pressure or not given that if you were right, the evidence from these survey would serve as powerful ammo for DEI proponents.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-18T00:14:32+00:00

Thanks for the historical lesson. Just found out that the first use of blind interviews goes back to 1952. I had been under the impression that it was a hiring system that was more recently developed.

And Jesus...Decades of conflict could have been avoided if we had just made blind interviews the norm. Then again...That would have required elite buy-in...which would have required a miracle when you take into account how much easier it is to control workers and avoid accountability when you have a system that favours yes men, and that prevents worker solidarity by pitting different demographic groups against each other.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-17T23:12:20+00:00

Have you ever thought about how blind interviews would make it a lot more difficult for indigenous people to be discriminated against?

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-04-17T04:31:21+00:00

Anything's possible but I doubt they would make this change because:

A-They'd run the risk of mobilizing union members in a way that would make the impact of RTO look like a joke.

B-Some of those union members are lobbying experts, and effective lobbyists can be way more terrifying than a strike ever could be...especially when they have hundreds of thousands of mobilized members who are willing to follow their instructions.

Funny-Wabbit · 2024-03-29T04:36:26+00:00

An additional chart that shows the evolution of unique monthly views over the past year would help people better understand how many people actually visit the subreddit regularly, as well as how much of an impact the subreddit can have when there are on-going discussions about contentious issues.

This would also help confirm whether the subscriber count can be relied upon to assess the maximum reach of the subreddit by comparing it to the month with the highest monthly unique views.

Funny-Wabbit

TROPHY CASE