Canada's hybrid work proposals ‘threat to health’

Canadian Federal Public Servants are complaining that the Government's plan to get them back to the office after COVID-19 is confusing, disjointed and jeopardises health and safety.

This follows the Treasury Board’s release of guidelines on hybrid work arrangements, tasking Departments with deciding "whether the location of work can be made flexible, to what extent, and how".

Treasury Board spokesperson, Barb Couperus said it was up to Deputy Heads of Departments (Permanent Secretaries) to make decisions about health and safety, guided by public health authorities and workplace health and safety committees.

"Given the diversity of the Federal Government’s workforce and operations, there will be no one-size-fits-all," Ms Couperus said, noting work sites varied from coastguard ships to laboratories and prisons.

President of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, Jennifer Carr, said the Treasury Board’s decision to devolve the responsibility of figuring out how to bring employees back into the office to individual Departments meant approaches were not co-ordinated and varied widely. 

She said that made it difficult for the union to give guidance to members on how a proper return to work should happen.

Ms Carr (pictured) said that given many of the Institute’s 60,000 members had been working on the front lines since the start of the pandemic, she was seeking assurances that workplaces were safe.

The Canadian Association of Professional Employees called for a suspension of return to offices, citing concern with “the serious and unnecessary risk to the health and safety” of its members being required to return to the workplace as the COVID-19 pandemic entered a seventh wave. 

Association President, Greg Phillips said members had not been given any rationale for why it was necessary to start hybrid working and come back into the workplace now.

"Treat us like the professionals we are, show us the rationale, explain to us why it's necessary. Otherwise we're left to just wonder — to not know what the heck is going on," Mr Phillips said.

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Trump promises to ‘purge’ bureaucracy

Former United States President, Donald Trump is ready to declare war on the Federal Public Service should he regain power in the 2024 election.

Former aides close to Mr Trump (pictured) have been set to work reviving and expanding his signature proposal to upend the Public Service, quickly purging thousands of Federal employees if he were to return to office. 

The plan would bring back Schedule F, a workforce initiative Mr Trump pushed in the 11th hour of his term to politicise the bureaucracy.

His former and current confidantes are, through a network of Trump-loyal think tanks and public policy organisations, creating lists of names to supplant existing Public Servants.

They have identified 50,000 current employees to dismiss under the new authority they seek to create, though they expect to only actually fire a fraction of that total and hope the resulting “chilling effect” would cause the rest to fall in line. 

In October 2020 Mr Trump signed his controversial Executive Order creating Schedule F, a new class of Federal employees exempted from the competitive service.

The Order sought to remove career Federal workers in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” jobs from the General Schedule into a new job classification where virtually all of their Public Service protections were absent.

Although the Trump Administration began efforts to reclassify jobs into the new Schedule F, they ultimately were unable to move any workers before January 2021, and President Joe Biden quickly signed an Executive Order rescinding the edict as one of his first acts as President. 

The former Trump Administration officials envision quickly shifting many employees under the new classification, making those positions eligible for quick hiring and firing without the normal protections afforded to Public Servants.

The new flexibility would allow a future Trump Administration to get rid of any employees it deems as standing in the way of implementing its agenda and replace them with loyalists. 

“It literally takes five minutes to reissue it,” a former Trump Administration official said of Schedule F’s revival.

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Young Public Servants ‘in devious acts’

The Commissioner of the Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption has criticised some young Public Servants for “engaging in devious acts”.

Speaking at the annual Young Leaders Seminar, Rashmi Aslam said that when the Commission was established in 2007 the understanding was that it would target long-serving Public Servants who had learned how to manipulate the system.

 “Today we see that was a misconception as we have noticed a number of young people are involved in corruption-related activities which are as prevalent now as they were 15 years ago,” Mr Aslam (pictured) said.

 “The most common cases include fraud, bribery, obtaining financial advantage and abuse of authority.”

 Mr Aslam said that in the recent past, the Commission had witnessed some of the biggest personalities in Fiji’s society caught out because of a lack of integrity, bringing shame to themselves, their families and the people who followed them.

 “It is the responsibility of the Commission to protect the future of the country from those who would seek to use their position to undermine it,” Mr Aslam said. 

 “When the future generation take up important roles in society, the nation has to have a generation of leaders who are ready to lead with integrity.”

 He told seminar participants that as young leaders they were the invaluable asset of this country and he hoped they would grow up as a generation that valued the principles of honesty and integrity.

 “The objective of the seminar is to empower the future generation to build their personality with one of the most important values of humanity — integrity,” Mr Aslam said.

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Irish civilian-military ties ‘strained’

A new report has found the relationship between senior Irish Defence Force leaders and their Public Service counterparts has been “extremely strained” in recent times.

The assessment said the Department of Defence had voiced concern about tensions in its dealings with Defence Force officers in areas such as the division of powers, pay and conditions, and a perception Public Servants were micromanaging military affairs.

The report found that relations between the lower-level officials on both sides was generally cordial, but noted that middle management sometimes lacked the autonomy to make decisions.

The unpublished report, compiled by the Department of Public Expenditure as part of the Organisational Capability Review program, noted that staff complained about “widespread negative and at times hostile media coverage” of Defence, “especially on social media which has involved personalised attacks on some named senior officials”.

“This negative and critical media coverage has contributed to tensions in the military-civil relationship,” the report said.

“In response, the Department has started its own Twitter account and is more proactive in getting its message out there.”

The report said the civil-military relationship was also affected by “a palpable sense of frustration” among Defence Force members about a perceived failure by the Department to represent their interests and concerns to the Government.

This was particularly the case in the areas of pay and conditions, recruitment and retention.

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Johnson: The joke is on us

The words that have already been written about United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s (impending) departure from office will fill a library. Apart from the Murdoch-directed right wing press, most have been far from complementary.

During his term in office Johnson’s Tories treated the regional media with disdain, often banning their journalists from press conferences on their own patch in favour of the fawning nationals.

As a result, his departure was greeted with almost universal enthusiasm from this section of the Fourth Estate, but of all that has been written, I believe the editor of the Stoke-on-Trent daily, the Sentinel, Marc Waddington raised a significant and rather disturbing point when he asked: How could we have been taken in by him?

Under a headline Worst among equals, Waddington described the ending of the Johnson era as “ignominious and fitting”, while maintaining that the warning signs of the Prime Minister’s character had been there for years. 

“His adultery — cheating on his wife while she was battling cancer being one of the particular lowlights — and his consistent lying; his awful comments about the Hillsborough disaster; the infamous ‘letter box’ jibe at Muslim women, the references to African people as ‘piccaninnies with watermelon smiles’,” Waddington writes.

“Whether his transgressions were in his personal, journalistic, or earlier political life, they all made one thing patently clear: The man lacked the moral fibre for the job he so coveted. In fact, he lacked the moral fibre for pretty much any role he has ever had.

“What is most staggering is that we as a country, armed with all this knowledge, were willing to trust him, or at least give him the benefit of the doubt; as though someone who has failed so many times to do the right thing and to behave like a decent human being would somehow transform into a paragon of probity and decency once invested with huge power and responsibility.

“It was never going to happen. And it didn’t. And in that respect, the joker has made clowns of all of us.”

Waddington states that any one of the scandals in the long litany of those that have dogged Johnson’s time in office would have, in the past, been the undoing of any principled politician — and many unprincipled one.

“Not in these times, for some reason. It seems we live in some sort of post-truth, post-moral era,” he writes.

“In politics, personal responsibility seems to have been supplanted by self-belief. As long as you believe you are doing the right thing — or just say you are — then that’s OK.”

Is it true, as Waddington states, that somehow over the past few years we have become more tolerant of utterly shameful behaviour? Was Johnson merely testing the limits and guilty only of taking one step too far?

Perhaps most importantly, is this a continuing decline into the gutter so that future leaders will be able to get away with all that Johnson has done — and more?

These are question that can only be answered by the mood of people, not just in the UK, but around the world. I am pessimistic. The signs from Moscow to Myanmar are not good. Decency and tolerance are becoming niche qualities. 

Meanwhile, the Beast of Brexit will leave the United Kingdom in a far worse state than when he found it — and many will wonder whether there is anyone in the Brexit rump of the Conservative Party at Westminster who has the talent and ability to pick up the pieces.

EU consultants’ value questioned

The European Commission has been criticised over the way it hires and uses external consultants “which does not fully ensure that it maximises value for money or fully safeguards its interests”.

A report by the watchdog body, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) found that the amount the Commission spends on external consultants had risen from €799 million ($A1.2 billion) in 2017 to €971 million ($A1.46 billion) in 2020.

According to the report, there were clear issues as there was no definitive framework for using external advisory services.

Commenting on the report, ECA member, François Roger-Cazala said outsourcing some tasks could be useful and sometimes necessary.

“However, the European Commission should make sure that in doing so it maximises the value obtained for the amount of money disbursed,” Mr Roger-Cazala (pictured) said.

The auditors warned there were risks “related to the concentration of service providers, over-dependence and conflicts of interest which are not sufficiently monitored”.

The report stated there were also issues with how the added value of consultants’ work was assessed.

According to the report, the Commission relied on these external services as they provided a cheaper alternative to hiring staff on-site.

The study comes after criticism last year concerning the Commission’s use of the ‘big four’ consultancy firms, PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte.

Mr Roger-Cazala said the Commission had agreed to implement the report’s recommendations, which included greater transparency as well as developing measures to decide on whether outsourcing work was necessary.

“At the moment, that is not happening enough,” he said.

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Singapore officers get mid-year pay-out

Singapore's Public Service Division (PSD) says it has decided to pay all the City State’s Public Servants a mid-year annual variable component (AVC) of 0.35 of monthly salaries.

In a statement, the PSD said the decision had been made after close consultation with public sector unions, and was a progressive approach considering the uncertainties in the local and global markets.

In addition, Public Servants in middle grades will receive a one-off payment of $S200 ($A208.46), while those lower down the pay scale will get $S400 ($A416.72).

The mid-year payment takes into consideration that Singapore’s gross domestic product growth in 2022 is likely to come in at the lower half of the forecast range of three-to-five per cent.

Deputy Secretary-General of the National Trades Union Congress, Cham Hui Fong said Singapore’s economy was recovering, with the resumption of activities post-pandemic.

“The 0.35 AVC pay-out is a timely recognition of our Civil Servants' dedication in serving the people during the pandemic period," Ms Cham (pictured) said.

“The union especially supports the PSD’s announcement of the lump sum payments for the junior officers.”

General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Public Employees, Sanjeev Kumar Tiwari said that given the current economic uncertainties, geopolitical tensions and inflationary pressures, the union appreciated the mid-year AVC.

“We hope things will turn around so that there will be better outcomes at the end of the year," Mr Sanjeev said.

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