Thoughts on fighting the new federal in-office policy

I volunteered to help my former union fight the federal government’s garbage new 3-days-in-office policy.

Because here’s the thing: employees who can work from home have proven they can work from home. There is no valid productivity reason to be imposing this policy. In addition to having no valid productivity purpose, this policy is bad for employee quality of life, and it is bad for the environment. On the other hand, it might sell a few sandwiches.

I haven’t heard back from my former union, so here are the ideas I intended to share with them:

1. Start tracking all costs related to all unnecessary commutes

It used to be that when your employer made you go somewhere for a work purpose, your employer paid mileage and a per diem. This was in recognition of the fact that you, the employee whose labour the employer is purchasing, would not be going but for work requiring it, on your personal time and at a cost to you.

I would love it if a union spearheaded a campaign to have affected employees start submitting invoices for mileage and per diems up to three times per week.

But if that’s somehow too radical a suggestion despite its strong historical and economic basis, at the very least information should be collected about the costs employers are unilaterally imposing on employees with this unnecessary in-office policy:

• time cost (proxy: hourly wage?)
• commute costs (bus fare, car costs, parking)
• professional costs (makeup, dry cleaning)
• other costs (loss of home-office credits, additional childcare)

This would be useful information for unions to start compiling if they haven’t already. This isn’t just salaries failing to keep up with inflation so employees have less purchasing power year over year, this is the employer deliberately and unilaterally imposing unnecessary costs on employees who have proven they can do their job from home.

2. Act your wage

This unnecessary in-office policy effectively requires employees to donate their free time to their employer, because commute time is currently taken from the employee’s non-work time rather than from the paid hours the employee and employer have contracted for.

It makes sense that we got used to that arrangement in the olden days, pre-covid and pre-internet. Employees were responsible for getting themselves to the workplace and then the employer provided the necessaries from there. But now we’ve proven that congregating in expensive downtown real estate isn’t necessary to do most of the actual work, so the same presumption should not apply.

I accept that employers have the right to make employees do pointless work (e.g. attending meetings that ought to have been an email). If they want to add to the pile of pointless work the requirement that employees commute to a space where they maybe don’t even have a desk and just end up talking to people over the internet anyway, so be it. But these pointless obligations have to come from the time contractually paid for by the employer, not from the employee’s personal time. If it turns out employees aren’t able to get their work done within the time the employer pays for because the employer now also expects them to spend 6 hours a week on the bus, the employer will either need to pay more hours or require less pointless work.

I would again love to see a union spearhead this collective action. If employers can unilaterally impose additional unremunerated hours on employees, what is the point of your collective agreement.

3. Just say no

I know there’s a lot of resistance to acts of resistance among office workers because they’re paid better than many other fields and they generally have better working conditions too. They think they should be quietly grateful and/or they worry they would seem out of touch for fighting this.

I would argue that with that economic privilege comes the responsibility to stand up to unfair treatment. If even governments as employers are proving this disrespectful of the time and well-being of their highly-trained, hard-to-replace workforce, what hope is there for anyone?

If this garbage policy comes into force in September, I think unions should lead the fight on employees refusing to obey it and should also defend in full any employees who face discipline as a result. If the employer ends up overwhelmed with the paperwork of attempting to enforce a policy that, again, isn’t even necessary for productivity, then perhaps they’ll reconsider what both employers and employees should actually be spending their finite time on.

Employers are not entitled to conscript employees’ non-paid time for the purpose of justifying expensive real estate and selling sandwiches. No.