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I had a private comment in response to my post on Friday about questions members could put to federal labour unions, say at an AGM today. It included counter-arguments others might have in mind, so I decided to respond publicly.

I know it makes sense, historically, that centralized employees were responsible for the travel part of the labour contract. I presume the presumption started in the context of factories, where the employer provided the expensive machinery required to do the job, and when it was inconceivable that employees could do the work from home. Each side contributed something necessary to the bargain: fair enough. That’s not the case here.

What the union says was learned from the first few years of COVID is that productivity was actually improved when employees worked from home: there is no labour-related reason to require employees to commute regularly to central locations. Working from home even has all sorts of additional benefits for things the employer and current government purport to care about, like the environment, public health, and substantive equality.

To hear the union tell it, the workplace is now Orwellian and dystopian, not to mention non-compliant with the requirements the employer thought were reasonable to impose on employee home offices at the beginning of the pandemic. But then in practice the union asks employees to be patient as the employer exploits and mistreats them and official processes run slowly. For a legal presumption that, quite arguably, no longer makes sense.

For the record, here was my crude math:

Crude math (6 hours x 48 weeks) puts that at 288 hours of commuting per year. Assuming a 7.5 hour day, that is 38.4 work days. Phrased differently, that is 7.68 work weeks per year confiscated from each employee, just to go to the internet from a different room. That’s certainly more than they offer in vacation time. Even with only a half-hour commute, it’s still about 4 full work weeks per year of your free time.

I invite fact-checking. I would be genuinely interested to hear the union’s numbers on how much time this policy has already cost members, and how much their patient approach is expected to cost employees as a class before it gets resolved in court or Parliament. But I haven’t heard that the union is fired up enough about the value of members’ time to even be collecting this information for future use.

It cannot be that radical for a union to take the position that, while employees will comply with the pointless and harmful new policy the employer saw fit to impose, it will be at the employer’s cost. If this commute is, in the employer’s view, essential contractual work, it must be presumed to come from the hours the employer has contracted for. This argument is consistent with some lofty legal principles some judges care about (and also, I suspect, with the principle behind per diems and mileage: that the employer is financially responsible when it forces employees to incur costs through otherwise unnecessary travel).

If the employer is the one bearing the cost of this policy instead of employees — if commute time shortens the contract time available to employees for actual work that needs to be done to serve Canadians — then the employer will have incentive to reconsider. From what I’ve seen, nothing the union is currently doing is giving the employer incentive to reconsider.

I’d enjoy watching representatives of the federal government appear in court to argue the opposite presumption: that it has a legal right to waste employee time and compromise their health without even offering them additional pay. That not only does an employer have a legal right to unilaterally impose extra, non-productive hours without justification, but that employees should bear the costs of those hours while official processes slowly unroll. These arguments are, in my opinion, less consistent with important constitutional and contractual principles.

I’ve heard the argument that deducting commute time from contract time would make employees fight amongst themselves: “it’s not fair, my colleague’s commute is longer, therefore I do not support this policy.” I would suggest this is the wrong battle. I would hope a union that believes in solidarity would be skilled at keeping employees focused on the matter of an employer who demonstrably does not care about employee time or health instead of fighting amongst themselves.

I get that there’s a perception that office workers are spoiled, and complaining about this could seem out of touch. And yeah, their conditions and pay are better than many / most workers, undoubtedly. But what if what is actually out of touch is to not realize that it’s all the same fight against being exploited and mistreated? What if federal government workers, skilled and actually essential, are literally best situated to push back against where this is going, alongside less privileged others already in the fight? I believe that’s a lesson we’re supposed to have learned from history.

If even labour unions for skilled federal employees are this passive and uncreative about collective action under the world’s extremely bad and getting worse circumstances, we are truly fucked.

So, I argue again for a world where unions match their action to their rhetoric by taking the position that under these circumstances, for these reasons, commute time will be presumed to come from the weekly hours the employer has contracted to pay for.

Is it malicious compliance? Maybe. Is it likely to get the government’s attention considerably faster than any other idea unions have implemented to date in response? I think so. Would a judge refuse to uphold harmful and pointless government policies that exploit workers for no productivity benefit and at significant risk to their mental and physical health? I truly, truly hope so.