This week, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) launched an unprecedented employee surveillance system that will track individual employee’s login locations, a hostile measure to enforce its wasteful and counterproductive return-to-office directive. This system is wasteful use of resources and shows contempt for both workers and taxpayers.
“Instead of ensuring federal workers have the tools they need to support Canadians through a historic national crisis, the government is once again treating high-impact professionals like children,” said CAPE President Nathan Prier. “Every Canadian should be concerned about what the government is modeling for employers across the country, as well as the outright waste of taxpayer dollars these attacks represent.”
ESDC, one of the largest departments in the core public administration, has not disclosed how much increasing surveillance of employees will cost taxpayers, nor how much management time and energy these initiatives will eat up.
Despite warnings from employees and unions about serious privacy risks, the government is moving forward with an invasive and ultimately unnecessary system. This new measure appears to contradict Treasury Board guidance that any tracking of office attendance not be done at the individual level, unless as part of a formal investigation.
While the government’s own evidence shows that federal public sector employees are more productive when working remotely, the Treasury Board and senior management have insisted on less productive and far costlier workplace policies.
CAPE will continue to fight to protect its members’ privacy, and push for greater remote work rights as a key plank of increasing government efficiency. By expanding remote work, the government can reduce its costly real estate footprint and free up office space urgently needed for affordable housing. Invasive surveillance measures are yet another example of how significantly senior federal civil service management have rejected evidence-based approaches to government productivity.
