While much has been reported about the impact of the Phoenix pay system on current federal employees, comparatively little has been said about the harm done to retirees.

Many retirees have been waiting very long periods of time – 10 months and more – for their final pay, severance payment, or even for their pension payments to begin. These often represent very significant sums and have become a financial burden on those affected as well as a significant source of stress during a time of life transition.

These long-serving former employees have very little recourse available to them to help solve their pay and severance problems. The Pay Centre often tells them they are not a priority and that, as retired employees, they do not have access to the grievance procedure. They don’t know where to turn and, as a result, often try to resolve their problems directly through their various departments and eventually their Member of Parliament.

For this reason, I wrote this week to Treasury Board President Scott Brison to specifically urge him to make resolving the Phoenix pay system’s impact on retirees a priority – in particular, by assigning more resources to fixing such chronic issues. I will update members on the minister’s reply.

Better Together,
Debi Daviau

Fellow members,

Recently, I sent an opinion piece to the Globe and Mail about our members’ ongoing problems with the Phoenix pay system and what I consider to be one of the root causes of the debacle: outsourcing. You can read my article here.

Its publication this week gives me an opportunity to also update you on a few of the things we’ve been doing, as your union, to mitigate the impact and expedite the fixing of Phoenix, which  from the start of the crisis we argued should never have been rolled out. Against our warnings, the government did so anyway, confident no doubt that the problems would soon be fixed. They weren’t.

After many long months of lobbying, protesting and pleading with the government, however, I now feel more confident in saying that I believe we have begun to turn a corner with the employer, if not in finding an immediate fix at least in establishing a common approach to fixing the Phoenix system.

In May, PIPSC filed two policy grievances against the employer – our only real legal means of pressuring the government to repair the system and properly compensate all our members who have been harmed or impacted. While these grievances are unlikely to expedite a final fix, they do establish rigorous expectations on our members’ part regarding an eventual resolution and compensation. This followed many months of assisting literally hundreds of members in filing individual grievances, many of which have been resolved, as well as writing to and meeting with ministers, arguing new measures be adopted to assist members, keeping the issue alive in the media, offering loans to those particularly hard hit, organizing many of our members to protest, and lobbying – successfully – for more money to be spent on fixing the system.

In late June, an invitation for me to meet with the new ministerial working group set up to fix Phoenix finally opened the door to closer collaboration between the government and some of our CS Group members in finding solutions. I hope this will lead to better appreciation of our members’ importance and an eventual change in the government’s outsourcing practices so that such disasters will be prevented from happening in the future.

Better Together!

Debi Daviau

President

The recent recommendations of yet another consultants’ report on Shared Services Canada (SSC) demonstrate that, when it comes to federal government outsourcing, there’s no shortage of private sector advice. The “SSC Resource Alignment Review,” begun last year at a cost of $1.35 million by Gartner Canada Co., criticizes the government for the fact that it “vastly underestimated the size, scale and complexity” of its IT plans. It then proceeds to recommend a number of changes – e.g., a joint SSC Transition Task Force comprised of industry representatives and government executives, a “relief valve” to allow departments to find alternatives when SSC can’t deliver, and the need to consider a new structure for SSC, “such as an agency, crown corporation, strategic partnership, joint venture” – all of which would, if implemented, promote even wider outsourcing of services than is practiced now.

It seems like only yesterday that Public Services Minister Judy Foote stood in the House of Commons and insisted SSC would not be allowed to outsource nearly a third of its workforce, as a 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers report commissioned by SSC sought to do. This latest report deserves to meet the same fate.

After successfully negotiating stronger language to protect our CS Group members from the impacts of outsourcing, the suggestion that Shared Services should now be outsourced on an even grander scale than proposed under the Harper government is a bitter irony, given the Liberal government’s promises in 2015 to reduce spending on outside consultants to 2005-06 levels.

Equally troubling is the fact that the report’s “Management Summary” (the full report has not been made public) lists no fewer than 34 instances in which information has been redacted, meaning that the government is not sharing all the analysis and recommendations on which the report is based. PIPSC is filing access to information requests to learn more.

All of this comes on the heels of another separate report based on a 2016 survey of SSC employees by Ipsos Public Affairs which found, among other things, that outsourcing has contributed to a massive drop in morale at the department – a finding that corroborates our own survey findings of 2015.

Outsourcing didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now – as we are constantly reminded by the chronic cost overruns, delays and other problems associated with email consolidation, the Canada.ca website and pay transformation alone.

When it comes to outsourcing we’re all at risk of being Phoenixed.

The government should stop its overreliance on outsourcing and start listening to its own employees. That begins with investing in our members and the resources they need to make SSC succeed, not outside companies.

PIPSC will be writing to Treasury Board President Scott Brison to convey our concerns in detail and will pursue all means at our disposal to ensure the Gartner report is never implemented.

Better Together.

Debi Daviau,

President

Fellow members,

Next week, June 11-17, is National Public Service Week (NPSW). Since 1992 it’s been an occasion to recognize and celebrate the contributions Canada’s public service professionals make to society. The Professional Institute supports this celebration of our members’ accomplishments. In fact, we first proposed it.

Given, however, the many, still-unresolved problems with the Phoenix pay system, we also feel it is vital we send a message to the federal government this year that failure to accurately and reliably pay federal public employees is no way to recognize them.

For this reason, we’re encouraging PIPSC members to wear a “Fix Phoenix” button next week. When you do, not only will you be helping us get our point across, you’ll also be discouraging the government from continuing to outsource work best performed internally – such as processing your pay – to large multinationals like IBM.

“Fix Phoenix” buttons and other visibility items are available at bettertogether@pipsc.ca.

I urge you to join in this effort. After all, we’re worth it, and it is only by working together that we can help ensure the government fixes Phoenix once and for all.

Better Together!

Debi Daviau,
President

“Today’s update by Deputy Minister Lemay indicates that the government has again failed to plan ahead -- this time for entirely predictable increases in the numbers of employee payroll adjustments needed to implement new collective agreements,” said PIPSC Vice President Steve Hindle. “The government’s plans for dealing with these increases and achieving so-called ‘steady state’ are based on employing previous and new staff, most of whom have yet to be hired. The government should have foreseen this challenge months ago. The number of pay transactions resulting from implementation of new collective agreements is only going to increase over the coming months.”

The announcement this week that the federal government will temporarily hire an additional 200 staff, invest a further $142 million over three years, and introduce even more measures to expedite fixing Phoenix is welcome, if long overdue, news.

Given the ongoing cost to government, taxpayers and federal employees, however, one has to ask if Phoenix was ever really worth it to begin with. It wasn’t.

Compounding this problem is the likelihood that a speedy fix will be difficult – especially since new resources take time to be effective – a fact that Parliamentary Secretary Steven MacKinnon seemed to acknowledge in his remarks on Wednesday.

While the additional $142 million will be spent over the next three years, no new time lines for fixing Phoenix were provided in this latest announcement – something employees are anxious to know. A technical briefing planned for next week may reveal more.

In short, while we should be cautiously optimistic that progress is being made, we should also be wary of governments bearing new fixes – especially those that come without clear timelines and that enhance an already-flawed contract with IBM.

In fact, one glaring omission in this week’s announcement was any mention of what PIPSC considers to be a root cause of the Phoenix troubles – outsourcing IT transformations to multinational companies such as IBM, who have a vested interest in additional, ongoing contracts.

After everything that we’ve seen so far, now is the time to look in-house and ensure that the government's own IT workers are managing the system going forward. We will never reach the government’s long-promised “steady state” without them. Only then can we – and all Canadians – really say whether the fixes are worth it.

Better Together.

Debi Daviau
President

Fellow members,

Since 1992, National Public Service Week (NPSW) has been an occasion to recognize and celebrate the contributions Canada’s public service professionals make to society. The Professional Institute supports this celebration of our members’ accomplishments and their true value to Canadians.

Given, however, the many, still-unresolved problems with the Phoenix pay system, we also feel it is vital we send a message to the federal government this year that failure to accurately and reliably pay federal public employees is no way to recognize them.

For this reason, while we will not be boycotting NPSW events, we will be encouraging PIPSC members to take part in sending a message to our Employer to “fix Phoenix” once and for all during National Public Service Week, June 11-17.

Buttons and other visibility items urging the government to “fix Phoenix” will soon be available for members to order, download and display.

I urge you to join in this effort. After all, we’re worth it, and it is only by working together that we can help ensure the government fixes Phoenix once and for all.

Better Together.

Debi Daviau
President

After defending literally hundreds of individual member grievances related to the Phoenix pay system and lobbying the government for many months with no permanent fix in sight, PIPSC has today filed policy grievances against the federal government, accusing the Employer of continuously violating the terms of our collective agreements since the implementation of the new Phoenix pay system in February 2016.

Specifically, we state that the Employer has, among other things, “made continuous and on-going errors in pay, including but not limited to: failure to be paid, substantial delays, miscalculation, underpayments, overpayments, and inaccurate payments for overtime, extra duty pay, allowances, annual increments, retroactive pay, acting pay, promotional pay, payments in lieu of severance.”

In a second set of grievances, we are also grieving problems paying disability benefits and maternity/parental leave benefits as violations of our collective agreements and the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA).

Our members have shown remarkable patience and, in some instances, astonishing forbearance in coping with the problems and deprivations imposed by the government’s failure to accurately and reliably pay the salaries our members are owed.

Our demands that the Employer “immediately pay all monies owed,” “pay members accurately and in a timely manner” and, “process all information related to disability and maternity/parental benefits in a timely manner” are fair and reasonable demands to make under what for many have been – and remain – extremely trying circumstances.

Under Canadian labour law, individual union members are prohibited from filing class action suits and are obligated to seek remedies through established grievance procedures. We hope that today’s policy grievances expedite resolution of a problem that should never have been allowed to occur in the first place and should never be allowed to happen again.

Debi Daviau
President

Dear Members,

Since last summer PIPSC has been demanding that the government pay interest on late payments due to Phoenix. It is the least they could do for the hardship Phoenix has created. We have also called on the government to provide assistance for professional fees, like tax advice, that public servants have had to seek due to problems caused by Phoenix. We are hopeful that the government will respond soon with an announcement regarding this demand. This, after all, is only just and fair considering it was the mismanaged pay transformation project that caused these problems.

The government wants to assure us we are nearing “steady state,” but we know there are still many members with pay problems and others still reeling from the effect their pay problems have had on their lives.

After more than a year of living with the Phoenix pay system we are still in quite the mess. PIPSC leadership, stewards, consultation teams, volunteers and staff continue to hear from many members not in receipt of their proper pay. Many cases remain unresolved and we are doing everything in our power to help individual members with their pay problems and pressure the government to come up with a timely fix. We are also preparing to file a policy grievance as an additional measure to provide remedy to as many members affected by Phoenix as possible.

We are still escalating critical cases to the Treasury Board and Department heads. We urge you to contact your regional office to notify one of our Employment Relations Officers (ERO) if you are experiencing any problems with your pay. All our help starts with our EROs, so please identify your issues to us, even if you do not plan to file a formal grievance. They can lead you to help!

Better Together!

Debi Daviau
President