Montreal City Weblog

Kate 12:23 on 2022-06-01 Permalink Reply  

• steph 14:25 on 2022-06-01 Permalink

  *is ending in december 2022.

  I’m a provincial government employee. Covid, the health emergency, is what’s finally allowed me to work from home after dozens of years of asking for it. I love it, I never want to go back to the office. The needs of my job allow me to do all my work remote. With the end of the pandemic, I’ll have to go back to the office december 2022. That gives me (my union) 6 months to finalize negotiations to allow WFH.

  To date, they gave me no equipment aside from a 400$ allowance to equip myself. I’ve been working with my personal computer & personal phone. Rediculous. “It’s a crisis, be thankful for having a job, thanks for helping out, everyone has to do their part”. 2% increases with 7% inflation, it’s no wonder everywhere has retention problems. As a person, government services have become Kafkaesque and near impossible to obtain. Front line employees seem simply trained to pass the buck, managers are impossible to find. Blaming computer systems is flagrant and everyone just shurgs. The pandemic only agrressed these budding problems. I hope we make it out alright, but I have very little hope that the younger generations will have a decent quality of life.

  /rant.

• JaneyB 07:55 on 2022-06-02 Permalink

  I’ve actually found a lot of government-type services better under WFH. I’ve chatted on the phone with line-workers from banks, tax, EI, Videotron, universities etc and almost universally, they’re all in noticeably better spirits than when they have to work at the office. Also, they end up being more helpful and more resourceful. I hope most places like that keep WFH for most of the week. Teaching (adults) online, which is my case, is a bit aggravating and/or weird but is tolerable. That should go back to mostly onsite but lots of other jobs should stay mostly WFH, I think. A few days a week onsite is probably necessary for networking and job mobility – key for younger workers and the pre-retirement crowd. I’m optimistic about this great work experiment; this could radically the real estate market in a good way by allowing people to live outside the big cities (provided government monitors and fosters it – possible in QC).

• Joey 08:50 on 2022-06-02 Permalink

  I think what steph is describing is largely a function of Willam Baumol’s “cost disease,” which (quoting wikipedia) “is the rise of wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher productivity growth.” It originated in a study of the performing arts – Baumol and his colleague William Bowen observed that there haven’t been any productivity gains in classical music performance, basically, ever. A string quartet playing Beethoven requires just as many people working for just as long as it did 200 years ago, and yet the cost of putting on a performance has increase substantially.

  The authors concluded that this is an inevitable result of labour productivity gains in other sectors of the economy that have driven wages up; you have to pay musicians more than in the past because they could get relatively better-paying jobs doing something else. So even though performance hasn’t gotten any more productive (from an output-per-employee-hour perspective), you have to pay musicians salaries large enough to entice them to not become widget-makers or hedge fund assholes.

  Here’s a good, quick overview of the implication of cost disease for government budgets: https://aneconomicsense.org/2013/09/10/the-big-squeeze-on-government-consequences-of-baumols-cost-disease/

  “And the nature of what government provides makes it impossible to match the productivity growth rates that one has seen most spectacularly in goods such as microchips and hence computers, but more generally in manufacturing and agriculture. Government services, like many services, have had improvements in productivity, but at rates that simply cannot match the pace of productivity growth possible elsewhere.

  “Hence, because of Baumol’s Cost Disease the relative price of government services should be expected to go up over time. This is precisely what has been observed. There is no reason to attribute this rise in the relative price to allegations of corruption or lazy government workers. It is of course possible that corruption and lazy workers exist, but for this to have caused the rise in the relative price over time one would need to make the case that corruption and lazy workers are not only worse now than before, but that they have become steadily worse over time. There is no evidence that supports this.”