Bad diagnosis in public service sick-leave debate
BY KELLY EGAN, OTTAWA CITIZEN FEBRUARY 10, 2014
OTTAWA — Here’s what happens when an MP calls in sick, or when Tony Clement is flat out with the flu, unable to crawl to the limo: nothing.
MPs don’t have sick leave. Or maternity leave.
Absent a long-term disability, no one officially counts the days they “call in” sick. They don’t have to produce a doctor’s note. They don’t have to put on their hoarsest voice and fake-cough their way through the morning grovel to the short-pants in PMO.
They can just stay home. Today, tomorrow, all week, next week, all month if necessary. Do MPs take more than 11.5 or 18 days off annually from illness, like the average federal public servant?
Who knows? They don’t even take real attendance in the House of Commons. In a public document that outlines their $160,200 annual salaries ($76,700 extra for cabinet ministers), there is a provision about attendance, about which it’s difficult not to reach for the big sack of snarky.
It says $120 a day will be deducted from pay if a member misses more than 21 days in a session of the House, unless you’re away for these reasons: illness, official business, service in the armed forces or House adjournment.
And here’s the comical justification for those last exclusions: “because these days count as a day of attendance.” So, an MP is counted as “present” even when he’s at home with an illness, and attendance, in any case, seems to be self-reported. And they’re worried about secretaries and clerks jerking the system?
The Treasury Board president’s targeting of sick leave has that weird whiff of government trying to solve problems that don’t exist or aren’t pressing, like the long-form census nonsense or the face-slap to Canada’s war veterans.
And the sick-leave debate has this accusatory undertone of wide-scale fraud, as in: the numbers are higher than the private sector, therefore slackers and fakers, grown diseased on a diet of entitlement, are to blame.
Sick leave, one suspects, is not the biggest worry in the public service. We are, crazily, looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
If we accept that 11.5 days are taken in paid sick leave annually, this is about five per cent of the yearly total of days worked.
The more pressing matter for taxpayers, surely, is this: what are public servants doing with the other 95 per cent?
If gainfully employed, great. If not, this is not a union problem, this is a management problem. If there are too many public servants doing the wrong things, or nothing at all, this is a management problem, not a union plot.
Put another way, if the goal is to reduce the 11.5 sick days to eight or five or zero, what is the point if the worker is asleep at his desk anyway?
And, it should hardly need be said, sick leave is a benefit the government negotiated. It is not a “favour” the employer has bestowed on the working masses. And is it not rather rich that their masters in the House can be “sick” however, whenever?
There will be much parsing of numbers in this dispute and loads of unhelpful omissions. The payout for sick leave has risen sharply in the last decade or so, but why?
The Parliamentary Budget Officer puts the figure in 2011-12 at $871 million, or about 107 per cent higher than in 2001-02. But hold on. Adjusted for inflation, the increase is 68 per cent. And, of that, 25 per cent is due to increased wages, 25 per cent to a larger public service, 33 per cent to more actual sick days, and a further 17 per cent is put down to “interactions” of factors.
The real number to focus on is a 23-per-cent increase (over the decade) in the average number of sick days that a typical public servant takes in a year. (Further complicating things, according to the budget officer, is that Treasury Board counts employees in a way that makes the problem look even worse.)
Possibly the increase is due to an aging workforce and typical middle-aged maladies that afflict the demographic. Possibly there has been an increase in abuse.
Does it make sense, though, that over the course of a decade, tens of thousands of workers have suddenly become cheaters and con artists?
The diagnosis, doc, is just sick in the head.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896, or emailkegan@ottawacitizen.com">kegan@ottawacitizen.com
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