PSAC workers and supporters protest in downtown Halifax on Wednesday, April 26, 2023.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese
A labour expert says the agreement on remote work between public sector workers and the federal government could set the stage for future union negotiations.
Armine Yalnizyan, an economist and the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, says we are entering a brand-new phase of what gets discussed in labour negotiations in the wake of the pandemic.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada and Ottawa announced they had reached tentative agreements Monday morning for more than 120,000 workers, with wage gains and a letter of understanding about remote and hybrid work.
The letter outside the collective agreement promises a joint review of the government’s directive on telework, and the union says the letter will mean managers have to assess telework requests individually instead of the government applying a one-size-fits-all approach.
Yalnizyan says a case-by-case approach is appropriate for the post-pandemic era of work, even though it’s much more complicated than a one-size-fits-all policy.
She says issues of employee time, surveillance, productivity and the right to disconnect have all become hot-button topics in the wake of COVID, but haven’t really been baked into formalized language, putting PSAC and the government at the forefront of what’s bound to be an ongoing discussion.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 2, 2023.
