City Cuts Could Include The Wrong People: THE VOTER
The question of municipal layoffs is whether the staff that are let go will be the right ones.
For unionized staff, seniority and bumping rights often mean that the person who is actually identified as surplus and who might well be part of the problem is not the one leaving with their personal effects in a banker’s box. As we know, it’s very hard to get fired at the City of Ottawa. The incompetent but more senior person who’s wedded to ‘the way we do things’ might be kept on while the newer, bright young thing will get pushed out the door.
Non-unionized staff have some different protections they can avail themselves of to avoid termination. If whole programs and sections are dispensed with, those protections might not save them though.
Depending on how human resources handles the staff reductions, an individual might be able to switch with another. If a director-level position is to be terminated, HR might identify the position that ‘A’ is in as the one to go. ‘A’ might, in fact, want to stay with the city but his coworker, ‘B’, might want to leave. By getting terminated instead of just leaving voluntarily through resignation or retirement, ‘B’ will benefit from a separation deal that will usually include a financial component determined by their length of service and other benefits such as job-hunting supports, relocation assistance and the like. HR would switch ‘A’ into ‘Bs’ position on paper and vice versa and both would end up where they want to be. We might, through this process, be saddled with the person who is the deadwood rather than the one who, for the same reasons, they are attractive to another employer, would be an asset to the city.
Not so very long ago, there was a series of wide-ranging job cuts at the city and some very good people were lost. It’s not hard to see by the state of the city today that some of those retained were perhaps not the best choices. Let’s hope that this round will be more judicious and surgical.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
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So many city programs have expanded and increased city staff. Garbage “educators” to accompany the new garbage program, plus obviously, more bylaw. Arborists needed for the expansion of the city tree bylaw to the suburbs. No reduction in city staff to accompany moving jobs from city staff to contractors, of course
C
Staff cuts must be on the way because it’s the only way (sadly) that you can make substantive cuts to the budget.
Pencils and paper don’t make it.
Some will see it as the revenge of the taxpayer but there are lots of good city employees who don’t deserve what is likely to happen to them.
Better staff and political leadership would have never got staff to this point.
The people that should be fired are the people at the top who let things such as rail get out of hand.
There is a terrible price for mistakes. Too bad many of the people who made them aren’t the people who will be cut.
cheers
kgray
C,
Perhaps the City should be required to list contractors within their FTE count for each branch and department. That would be a more accurate count of how many bodies are working on delivering the product in a particular area of the City. Since they are having their wages covered by the City, albeit filtered through an outside company, they should be included in the City’s personnel numbers to create an accurate reflection of the true number of people being used to meet the City’s mandate.
That would make it easier to see if contracting out of the work actually leads to a reduction in city staff that corresponds with or exceeds the number of contract positions. Right now, it’s a kind of shell game that they play with staff being the peanut.
I’m not sure this is the place to put my comment but here it goes. Our cry baby mayor was shown someplace in Ottawa complaining about the Federal Government has never paid it’s share of taxes and he’s still going to the provincial and federal governments for money. I hope they turn him down. You should see how he looked. A real idiot. Does he have no pride? Oh I’m sure he doesn’t know what the word pride means. I hope the governments turn him flat down. He ruined our city actually worse than Watson.