Alice in Government Land, Part 2 - Deviousness

One of the great illusions when one joins the federal civil service is that the employer is benign, supportive and respectful of their employees, a model employer if you will. After 11 years of service, I have seen so many talented and motivated employees wither over the years from lack of acknowledgment and from exposure to politically-motivated, dysfunctional policy and procedures designed and implemented by invisible shadow creatures in Ottawa uninvolved and unfamiliar with the work we do.

At the moment our workload is crazy. With the economy tanking, there is a flood of newly unemployed. The Employment Insurance phone lines, previously understaffed, are now almost impossible to get through to and the wait times to get benefits grows longer each week. I think it takes about three months or more now. It has become a major political issue in Ottawa. The opposition is trying to make the "insensitive" Harper government look even worse in anticipation of another election in the coming year. In response, our department is hiring hundreds of new employees, but that takes time and takes staff off the phones for the job selection process, training and one-on-one coaching for a couple months after the training.

Pension call centre employees like myself are being begged and cajoled into taking "temporary" secondments to EI processing as a break from our phone work. I offered to do my part to help out, even though our own phones lines are quite busy too. At the very last moment the volunteers learned that "helping out for a couple months" translated into a minimum 1-year assignment. I smelled a rat and backed out immediately, siting my two days of pre-booked vacation in Utah which fell into the training period (which I canceled later anyway without telling them). There's no way I want to get stuck doing processing work for a year.

Since then I have learned that EI is trying, undoubtedly under pressure from Ottawa, to change the volunteers' temporary assignments to permanent ones without their consent. Rumour has it that this has already happened to the volunteers in Edmonton. Once they are permanent, the "volunteers" can likely be forced to work on the phones where the current employees are dropping like flies from the stress. As I have seen before, conscientious employees who offer to help management are sometimes rewarded this way. I really hope this doesn't happen to my wonderful co-workers who did volunteer. Personally, I feel I have just escaped from the train on its way to the concentration camps.

"If someone’s going to try to stab me in the back, I want to be there!" - Toronto Mayor Alan Lamport