Fed civil servants get 15 sick days a year which they can bank. How much has been banked? 15 million sick days!! That’s nuts.
— David Akin (@davidakin) May 13, 2015
Now, I’m no accountant, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but if they’re banked then then can be withdrawn, which if I know civil servants, means retirement date – vacation days – sick days = stop working day.
So, at $20/hour = $160/day * 15,000,000 days = $2,400,000,000.00 for zero productivity days.
That’s 2 Billion, 400 Million dollars that have to be accounted for if those days are ever used.
Use it, or lose it union lovers.
Math is hard.
$20 an hour? What century are you living in?
From the Treasury Board Fact Sheet on compensation in the federal civil servicer “women in the federal public service earn an average of $68,876, about 91% of the $75,762 that men earn “. So let’s use rounded numbers and average that to $72,000 for 2000 hours of work, and it’ll be $36 per hour, and that’s base. Fully loaded would be at least 1.5 times that, depending on many factors, even things like office space cost allocation (anyone with better data?).
So instead of $20, let’s conservatively estimate $54/hour, or $6.5 billion.
The military has a good scam going. They get a month of more vacation which they can bank. The total waste is that when you take a vacation a subordinate fills in. When you retire a year early a replacement a replacement must be hired, trained, or promoted.
Is the Federal Government a dumping ground for sick people?
Are uncivil serpents physically or mentally sick?
Banked sick days are banked until they are needed. If you remain healthy, the amount will continue to grow until you either quit, or retire. Then the banked sick days vanish, poof into nothingness. Unused sick days are not payed out as a bonus. This whole sick day thing is a red hearing. A small percentage of sick days will be payed out, not the whole amount.
I think it was at least 15 yrs ago, when they stopped being able to bank or roll over your vacation (unless you were unable to take it due to tasks/tours/etc, then you had to have a CO sign off on it). That was for the troops though, call me crazy, but I’d automatically assume differently for the megalith that is NDHQ…someone more current may be able to fill in the blanks.
After 5 years of service, military members get 25 days of leave every 1 April. All must be used before the end of March, that is you have 12 months to spend them. No banking, unless operational requirements dictate, very rarely done.
narf said, “his whole sick day thing is a red hearing. A small percentage of sick days will be payed out, not the whole amount.”
Narf, can you answer whether the gov’t has to carry the balance ‘owed’ on the books? Because every business I’ve worked with has to carry the amount until such time as it’s removed.
I used to work for a company that considered averaging 1 sick day a month was grounds for a sit down to discuss your excessive absenteeism and to receive a warning, the first step in disciplinary action.
yes they are “on the books” until the person leaves their job by quitting retiring or firing. but when you leave the job the sick days are removed from the books. they do just disappear. but this isn’t really an example of a contingent liability (yes we have seen the stats on how much is used by govt employees) but most of them don’t case this out.
as the first poster said “math is hard” and its even harder when you start from a faulty premise.
it should also be noted that the feds don’t have short term disability coverage if you don’t have sick days banked if you are sick for an extended period of time you don’t get paid. unless you are sick enough to get to long term disability.
I don’t know if the situation still exists in the civil service as when I worked in the Provincial CS back in the 1970’s and 80’s, whereby an employee could bank his sick time and actually retire early.
One fellow CS I knew well used up his “sick days” by retiring about 18 months early.
I can assure you unless fraud is occurring that doesn’t happen in the feds, provinces I don’t know
They don’t have short-term disability either. That is the reason for the sick day carry over.
I don’t know what percentage of unused leave gets paid out. But there are a hell of a lot of government employees who get sick in the last year or two of work – and the zero balance on their unused days magically coincides with their pension elegibility date.
I can tell you for a fact that sick days banked are NOT paid out by the Federal Govt of Canada (good friends and former colleagues of mine work there). Banked vacation days are typically paid out same year, after a small carryover to next FY.
The “risk” to the Federal Govt is only that at some point in the future, you might use about 50 or 60 days. Fact is though, sick days are STILL verifiable. If you use them to play golf, and you get busted, you’re gonna have vacation days docked, and any excess assessed as unpaid leave! (Ouch). Oh and there goes your performance appraisal, and maybe your career prospects to boot. No exec position for you, you wanker, now back to the cubicles!
used to be HR for Canada Post
Sick days were paid out one way or another…. It was amazing how many folks left on stress leave/ phantom back pain the year before they retired…Especially the women, it was rampant. Always heard about how “they” earned those days. sick days were paid out at current salary and please do not forget they continue to receive allllllllll paid benefits and their pensions continue to grow at that year’s salary base. As for disability? Of course they had long term, but it only pays out at 75 to 80% and all those glorious benefits stop being free. 100 % salary and benefits for Year? no comparison. Aren’t you glad you slave so they can enjoy they things you’ve worked so hard for and earned? I couldn’t stand the attitude of the public service, it was appalling, I tried for a year and couldn’t in good conscience work there anymore.
I’m a Transport Canada employee. It used to be that you could cash out your sick leave upon retirement, but those days are over, two contracts ago if I remember correctly. I’ve worked with people who never got sick and seldom took vacations and after 30-35yrs of service they had two choices, A) take a year or more of sick leave and then a year of vacation time – this left their section a person short for two years and while someone could be temporarily promoted to the position, the hiring process could not be started until they officially retired which left a lot of departments short-staffed, or B) retire immediately taking a lump sum payout of all the unused sick and vacation leave and getting raped by the taxman. Now when you retire your sick leave disappears and you don’t get a nickel for it. The last person to retire from my directorate left 48 weeks of sick leave on the table. As to annual (vacation) leave, now you cannot accumulate more than seven weeks of it. At the end of the fiscal year, any annual leave over the seven week total gets paid out automatically as overtime.
Long term disability for the civil service is handled by SunLife Insurance (since the ’70s) and you have to be unable to work for a year before they’ll pay out and they are the stingiest misers in the world. Your family doctor and the doctors at Health Canada can say you’re unable to work and sign the forms for workmen’s comp and your disability tax credit but unless Sun Life’s doctors agree you’re SOL. That is why everybody in the civil service tries to accumulate as much sick leave as possible, we’ve all known people who were screwed over by SunLife. I’ve known a woman in her 30s who needed every joint in her body replaced due to severe rheumatism she was turned down by SunLife and spent years on welfare before she won her case.
I know people who have banked their sick days for 15-30 years and go sick 9 6-12 months before their retirement.
Now … I … going to be SICK … just contemplating the magnitude of this UNIONISTA overreach. Alas, I am self-employed … so SICK days for me = NO MONEY. I guess I am too DUMB to get a government UNION job
I’m ex-military, now a Saskatchewan civil servant (unionized).
Between my military service and Provincial Gov’t employ, I worked in private industry, unionized. We got 1.5 sick days per month. At the end of the fiscal year, we were paid out for unused days at a rate of 75%.
I don’t know about other branches, but in my branch of Gov’t, we can bank the sick days and roll them over year after year, but we cannot ‘use’ them at the end (unless you pull off some type of deceit), nor do we get paid out for them. I seldom get sick, and don’t follow the “use ’em or lose ’em” routine a lot of people do. I currently have about 120 days accumulated.
On a side note, and just to take this discussion in a slightly different direction: in my branch, it is most likely the women who have used up their sick time, and most of the men are sitting on multi-months unused.
Ex Gummint employee here. Sick days were not paid out upon retirement. Most people booked sick time immediately before retirement date so the last day of sick leave coincided with the first day of retirement. I did.
I think sick days only encourages people to call in sick. At 1.5 days a month plus the 10 stat holidays a year that’s practically 2 4-day weeks every month. That’s what I call hardly working.
Private sector here, up until 12 years ago we had 10 sick days a year bankable to a max of 6 months, which were used for short term disability if they were not all used up, (if they were you probably didn’t work there long). Now we have 5 a year non-bankable but we do have short and long term disability. Use 3 of those days raises a flag at HR.
As for the unions, they should have to collect their own dues, pay taxes on the income and a worker should have the right to work with out paying those dues. They need to be more democratic, secret ballots in all votes unless agreed otherwise at the time of the vote (i.e. meetings). Also unions should be denied spending their dues income on any political activities bar lobbying for their workers/members direct interests.
I can’t recall anyone in my office in the last couple of years “suddenly” getting sick to use up their sick leave. If the person has a large bank of sick leave it means they are not abusing it and won’t, so lets punish those people, brilliant thinking that is, sort of like the “Beatings will continue till morale improves” This is pure crap designed to appeal the CPC base. It’s not much different than how the Liberals painted all the gun owners as nutbars that needed to be regulated.
This is the easy way out of dealing with issues in the Public Service,instead of cutting Treasury Board policies and pushing responsibility down to the frontline managers and letting them do their job of dealing with HR issues knowing that their senior management will back them. When I retire all my sick days vanish and that’s ok, they are an insurance policy and the system actually works for the most part, except now some policy wonk is nervous and politicians have found a way to fudge the numbers. As for pay, we can’t hire specialized staff as we pay half of what industry pays, only our clerical staff do well comparatively.
Parasites. Not the employers fault if the employee gets sick.
Civil servants can pay for their own insurance, just like private enterprise does.
Even CUPE admits the pay is higher compared to the private sector.
Which, I might add, is significantly higher than what this self-financed pension, insurance buying, self-employed groper who tries to pay bills while living client to client, makes.
To say I have no time for those who complain about not enough benefits understates my disdain.
Have a older friend who retired in 2010 and left 154 days sick leave on the table working for the Feds. Not even a thank you. Retired in July after 28 years with the Feds and total payout was somewhere around $9000 after taxes., almost all of it for vacation pay. Had 3 weeks banked and had enough years to get 6 weeks vacation annually. They did credit his vacation for the full year of 2010. Like he said, “only the brass and politicians walk away feeling like they won the lottery”. Working stiffs just walk away.
$9,000 too much. If you don’t work you shouldn’t get paid. Parasites.
Like the ant said to his fellow ants who are trying to carry a big piece of cow dung to the ant hill that is ‘downhill’ – ‘this shit has got to stop’……..
Just remember that when you reduce the pay and benefits to less than it’s worth being there then you get far worse service. There are a lot of things government does that you don’t see because they resolve issues before they appear.
Being in the public Service means working for bosses who main claim to fame is winning a popularity contest, Ministers that rarely get a chance to even grasp what their Departments do, much less manage it effectively, Treasury Board that does it’s very best to stifle innovation and productivity and a senior management that changes direction everytime they see a shiny new idea, without finishing the last one. It’s hard for most to stay motivated and upbeat. If you want a motivated, professional, trustworthy and honest Civil Service then you better be prepared to pay for it and give them the tools to do the job, otherwise be careful what you wish for.
My Dad worked 40 years at SGI despite being a union supporter he had ethics. I beleive he took some ridiculous low number of sick days – the rest were banked. When he retired he was able to quit 1.5 years early and still draw a full salary and benefits on that asked sick time.
The numbers are real and staggering.
Just remember that when you reduce the pay and benefits to less than it’s worth being there then you get far worse service.
Oh, you mean like health care delivery? Can it get worse, or be more expensive?
Anyway, there’s nothing the gov’t has that I want. It’s the other way around, it wants what I have.
Being in the public Service means working for bosses who main claim to fame is winning a popularity contest…
It also means you consume wealth and produce nothing.
I’m a federal unionized employee with previous military exp. I wear my blue colours on my sleeve. I’m quite prepared to take a hit on the sick leave issue as I think 15 days is too much. I have no intention on using my accumulated sick leave when I walk out the door.
What I’d like to add to the conversation is that the proposed TB plan is causing a great deal of angst among my colleagues, so much so that many of my buddies ask me if I’m still going to vote CPC. Even a recent update from our union rep on this issue finished with “I hope members have a long enough memory to remember this at the next federal election.” The direction a country takes is more than the sum of its dealings with the PS. To imagine Trudeau or Mulcair at the helm IMO is just too scary.
And slightly off topic, I can imagine the PS pension plan going to a defined contribution type of plan sometime in the future. I wouldn’t have a problem with that earlier.
When I retired from the federal gov’t after 36 years the processing clerk noticed I had banked more than 400 sick days that were about to be erased without compensation. “Wow! How did this happen?” he asked. “I was never sick”, I replied.
fed civil servants at present can bank sick days but they cannot use them unless they are sick. they also cannot get paid for them at retirement. John Lang’s comment is one that is reflected by many government employees, I personally know several.
People should be happy. If these hours are banked they cost no one a thing. These employees are not paid anything for unused sick credits. If they retire with them in the bank and, believe me many do, they are not compensated one iota. Since sick time is part of the pay packages that are negotiated and actually keeps wages down, this is money in the bank not for the employee but for the employer. It may also be another reason for others to use this time in a way that conservatives would not like. Since it’s “use them or lose them” many other employees do just that. If there was some compensation for not using them, many would not. And also since no one is replaced in the federal employ when someone goes sick, other workers just sucking it up to cover for sick employees, a lot of the so called cost of sick time is an illusion. I’ve been there I know a bit of how this works. If your argument against this system is ideological, I get it. If it’s based on economical reasoning, you may want to look into it a little deeper. The Treasury Board, for all it’s complaining about how this works amd how much it costs, just may be crazy like a fox. Just saying.
Remember the furor when the military stopped allowing large amounts of accumulated leave? No?
In the military if you get sick your pay stays the same while you get treated, with no set maximum, or until you get released, when private and government disability programs kick in. Not perfect mostly due to sclerotic Veterans’ Affairs but in-career it applies even better to non-operational functions that dominate the civil service. Everything is documented properly and so on. Offer that to the union then we’ll see the real issues.
Yet the people in this country expect many things from their government so in fact we are giving them what they want and generally did ask for, perhaps you did not, but many do and expect it. My job is regulatory and I spend a portion of that job reminding business of their responsibility to clean up their crap behind them and another portion reminding them that they aren’t the only special cupcake in the world and that others are using the same resource including other businesses. When we get it right you will barely notice because we step in quietly without fuss. Some companies are great to work with and rarely need me to get deeply involved, some smaller companies are pretty good and often my job is to get them to pull their head out of the box they are in and look at how they are interacting with others and then they figure the solutions. but there are companies out there that just don’t give a shit about anyone else and those I have no problem with ensuring they fulfil their obligations. Right now I am trying to coax 2 small town user groups to come up with a homemade solution for their issues, I will only act if they can’t resolve it themselves. I have way more work than I can possibly handle, I don’t go looking for the little guy to bug. I can also tell you many stories of Canadians phoning me to tell me there are to many laws and then demand that we create a law to deal with someone else. Most Canadians think they are competent and reasonable and therfore don’t need to be regulated but demand we regulate the other guy’s, because they are irresponsible. By the way did you thank the highway engineer that designed the bridge you drove over or applied the sight guide lines for the exit? what about that plane that flew overhead that has to be maintained to a certain standard, what about the navigation aid that allowed the ships pilot to guide the ship into the Port and Public Servant radio operator that advised him of outbound traffic and who is departing when. There are tons of PS employees labouring away in jobs most people don’t think about, because nothing went wrong. Government is not the answer to everything and neither is business, most rational people accept it’s a ever changing balance between the two to keep things going smoothly
By the way did you thank the highway engineer that designed the bridge you drove over or applied the sight guide lines for the exit?
And I bet that engineer was from a private company who could have done the same for anyone.
what about that plane that flew overhead that has to be maintained to a certain standard, what about the navigation aid that allowed the ships pilot to guide the ship into the Port and Public Servant radio operator that advised him of outbound traffic and who is departing when.
Yes, because private companies obviously want to crash their aircraft and sink their ships, thereby frightening their customers.
Same goes for the rest of your self-congratulatory nonsense, which is mostly to institutionalize Agenda 21 . It was private enterprise that figured out how to do things in a cleaner way. Certainly not gov’t parasites.
Most regulations of private enterprise are in place to give certain interests an edge over new competition by making doing business too expensive for the smaller competitor.
Witness the CSA. Parasites.
Yes, we did accumulate 15 days per year of sick leave. During my career, I was sick for about 2-5 days per year, except for the year I had to have a tumor removed and stayed off for 3 months. I retired will well over 100 days left. There is no cash pay out for sick leave not taken. This is the way most of we responsible civil servants behaved. I always considered the banking as insurance only. The new system the Conservatives brought in is a better idea, as there was increasing abuse by younger staff, and even my Director-General. Please do not tar everyone with the same brush. When I was a manager, I called out one employee who abused leave.
And I thank you for your service.
Unfortunately, now people think more like Colin and Obama that “You didn’t build that”.
They think the world will fall apart and people will all kill each other if the gov’t doesn’t run everything.