Federal sector workers forced to return to office

There is some renewed talk about work from home after the federal public sector told their workers they have to come to the office a few days a week.

CBC commentators criticized the complaints of federal public sector workers about returning to the office, but provided no analysis of the situation.

While it has long been a sport to make fun of the federal public sector as inefficient, it is not now (nor has it ever really been) true. If workers are complaining about a move by the managers in government, there is probably a good reason for it.

The complaint about the push to return to the office has come from loud voices with some legitimate concerns. Mainly, that workers do not see any reason for it except, it seems, the demands of small businesses that workers should spend their money in failing shops downtown. This is a terrible reason. Downtown Ottawa has been a ghost town for decades and small businesses do not "deserve" to have you go there and spend money.

What we need to be looking at is the increased productivity that has come with work from home. When you listen carefully through the laughter and derision from new commentators, you can hear the concerns of public sector workers revolve around:

All these things cannot be easily replaced when you "return to the office" without downloading costs onto the federal government workers themselves or the public through increased taxes.

Now, I am all for increasing taxes to provide public services (so long as it is on incomes), but these economic realities need to be considered by our inept manager class (and political commentators).

The directive has been simple. Federal government workers must return to the office for two days a week.

There is no reason to go to the office exactly two days a week. There may be some reasons to go no days this week, or be in the office all days of this week. But, that should be part of the process of distributing work.

A more sophisticated analysis of productivity increases from "work from home"—and not just "I didn't have to, so you should be able to"—needs to be outlined before making these decisions.

Productivity is not something easily fixed and to find out the real impacts we have to listen to the workers affected by policy—instead of those unskilled and lazy managers making the policy decisions.

We must move to a new way of working that incorporates the new technologies, not try to return to the past like the Luddites of old. This requires analysis of production and service provision beyond random "thoughts" about working that managers have.