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    Failure to user test

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    CKirkby

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    One of my recurring gripes is failure to user test. It makes life unnecessarily bad because it is entirely avoidable.

    Prenons, par exemple, la ville de Gatineau, qui tient une élection partielle le 9 juin 2024. Selon le dépliant que j’ai reçu:

    “Entre le 11 et le 23 mai 2024, chaque personne inscrite recevra un avis d’inscription par la poste. … [S]i vous ne recevez pas l’avis d’inscription … il faudra vous présenter à la commission de révision afin de vous inscrire.”

    Les dates de révision de la liste électorale? Les 21 et 22 mai, alors si votre avis d’inscription n’arrive pas le 23, il faut simplement construire une machine à remonter le temps.

    Le dépliant aurait pu indiquer que les citoyen.nes puissent verifier leur état d’inscription sur le site web avant le 23 mai, quand l’information pourrait être utile. Mais non. Ça, j’ai dû le découvrir moi-même, tardivement.

    I was also annoyed last week by the “event guide” for Doors Open Ottawa, which I absolutely adored prior to the pandemic. The guide used to be a tabloid-size brochure distributed to coffee shops, with photos and information about each building that could be visited, including accessibility info and a map so visitors could see what buildings were near to each other in order to maximize efficiency / indulge curiosity. The guide was fun and useful to peruse in advance and be guided by the days of.

    The event guide this year is a total of four pages, two of which simply list the name of each building, a partial address, and the hours of viewing. No blurbs. No photos. No info about toilets or parking. Maybe it’s clear from the name what the building is. Maybe it’s clear from the address what part of the city or environs the building is located in. But, or, maybe not. There’s plenty of information on the website if you open enough tabs and spend enough time clicking, I just don’t understand who organizers think this “event guide” will be useful for.

    Except the mayor, of course, who has claimed a full quarter of the guide for his messaging *and* saved on layout and printing costs.

    If you want people to participate, you have to think about their needs. If you’re not guided by users’ needs, what are you doing?

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    Injustice against white men

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    CKirkby

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    There’s a popular article in La Presse today about a white man who is furious that 100% of jobs are not available to him like they were to his white man ancestors.

    What kind of society are we even living in if a white man isn’t entitled by birth to every single job that exists.

    It certainly used to be that 100% of political jobs and church jobs and legal jobs and teaching jobs and medical jobs (etc.) were reserved for white men, and the piece would have you believe it is an injustice that, on occasion in contemporary society, certain jobs are designated for other groups.

    The piece suggests that white men’s sense of entitlement to every existing job is in fact so strong that they may find themselves compelled to lie on their job applications – for example, by declaring themselves to be non-binary, or pretending to support diversity and inclusion – rather than accept the principle that a workforce approaching 100% white men is bad, actually.

    There are certainly true injustices in hiring to be addressed, like how résumés with white-sounding names get more callbacks than those with names identified with Black or Asian cultures, even for employers who purport to care about diversity and inclusion. Or how male applicants are considered more qualified than female applicants with the same qualifications. Not to even mention the existence of laws that function to bar Muslim women from jobs they are entirely qualified for.

    But the piece doesn’t deal with any of these examples of actual discrimination, or accept the necessity of occasionally prioritizing demographic groups other than white men in an attempt to redress that group’s historical and ongoing overrepresentation in positions of societal power and privilege.

    Instead, it starts from the premise that white men are entitled to 100% of the things they want, going so far as to quote Martin Luther King in support of the notion that it is injustice that a white man was excluded from two teaching positions in the white-man dominated field of computer science.

    It is not. White men and the columnists who coddle them would do well to learn the difference between a sense of entitlement and actual injustice.

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    Voices against bad policy

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    CKirkby

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    It’s time for an update on the federal government’s garbage 3-day-in-office policy, in respect of which I remain an opinionated spectator. I had volunteered to help my former union but the only response I got was the general mailbox advising they had forwarded my message to the President’s office. This was unhelpful since my original email had already cc’ed the President’s office. Nonetheless, I sent them the link to my ideas, and I continue to think unions should start quantifying the costs to employees of pointless commuting, for use later on in the fight.

    But I have since heard from current members that the union is actually quite busy and full of fire, which is encouraging. A recent well-attended webinar explained to members the union’s actions and arguments and it sounds like they’re working various angles, including legal and public relations. Some ideas, I am delighted to report, trend toward malicious compliance.

    It also sounds like the union has found precedents from other jurisdictions where the onus is on the employer to justify the requirement for in-office time, separately for each employee. This type of substantive equality approach should obviously be favoured by a Liberal government headed by the First Child of the Constitution Act, 1982, at least if constitutional principles are more important than appeasing real estate developers who feel entitled to profit always and loss never. (I am not holding my breath for Trudeau et al to suddenly start matching their practice to their rhetoric.)

    One important point made repeatedly by union presenters is that members can’t just sit back while others do this work: power comes from collective action. Employees have to participate en masse to get the employer to take things seriously. Solidarity is the way to protect individuals and achieve change.

    There’s a nice touch at the end of the webinar where union presenters do a live demonstration of how to make a protest phone call. I think this helps demystify the process for members, who might then feel confident enough to do the same, although unfortunately no one answered the phone. It seems if you call Anita Anand you have to sit through a full minute and a half of bilingual messaging before being permitted to leave a voice mail. They deter you at every step, these people who are paid handsomely to listen to their constituents.

    A different current union member sent me a link to an excellent piece in the Ottawa Citizen by Brigitte Pellerin, who is also sarcastic about sandwiches and in favour of pushing back to zero days in office a week in response to government/employer overreach/disrespect.

    I welcome more union members to share information so I can continue my opinionated spectating. I would especially appreciate links to the employer-onus policies in other jurisdictions.

    I also invite members, if they think the idea of quantifying unnecessary commute costs is a good one, to repeat it to other members and their unions. One voice alone isn’t enough in this fight.

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    Kids these days

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    CKirkby

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    I sometimes think about what I’d be like if I were a kid now instead of decades ago.

    I’ve been trying to get people in power to listen since I was 7 years old. My first, most instinctive medium was sobbing, upon seeing a commercial for Foster Parents Plan, at the injustice of kids in Africa starving and covered in flies while we sat comfortably bingeing on chips and pop culture.

    Subsequent media included writing and directing a school play, short-form radio commentary, much writing in newspapers, and eventually research for Parliamentarians, on many of the same themes and topics as now but less dystopian then.

    If I were a kid now, staring down this future while adults expected me to smile for an unlivable wage while waiting to see whether climate or societal collapse comes first? I would be unmanageable with rage. I don’t envy parents right now, but that rage is legitimate.

    We’re taught that with a good education we can change the world. We’re taught we have freedom of expression, and that university campuses are the institutional vanguard of human truth. But when kids so much as politely sit together to raise the alarm about an actual genocide we can all literally see is happening and ask the people in power to at least just stop funding it, universities sic phalanxes of riot police on them. Kids see that adults’ rhetoric doesn’t match the practice, and they see little benefit to continuing to pretend when the status quo future is so bleak.

    I am in awe of this student’s bravery, clarity, and grasp of the facts. When are we going to stop taking orders that cause harm?

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    Thoughts on fighting the new federal in-office policy

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    CKirkby

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    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.

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