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Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail

 

Something is ailing the people who work for the federal government. They have among the highest absenteeism rates of any workers in Canada. Every day, about 19,000 of them are off on some form of sick leave. Federal civil servants, according to the Treasury Board, take off an average of 18 days a year because of sickness or disability – more than twice as many days as people who work in the private sector and nearly three times more than people who work in small businesses.

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But the best explanation comes from Andrew Graham, a Queen’s University professor of public-sector management who worked in government for more than three decades. As he told me: “The system is designed to invite abuse.”

Mr. Graham wants to stress that most public-sector workers are as conscientious and hard-working as he was. (He left government with 300 days of unused sick leave.) The problem is that, for the past 30 years, governments across the Western world have been eager to buy labour peace by piling on entitlements – which cost them nothing at the time.

“I remember when Treasury negotiated five days of family leave,” says Mr. Graham (who was responsible for running the Kingston Penitentiary, among other assignments). “And I said, who’s going to pay for it? And they said, Oh, you are. It was a classic case of central government trying to do a good thing and not thinking through any of the consequences.”

Any union worth its dues will fight for its workers’ right to exploit the system. And the government unions have more than earned their dues. “We did a pattern analysis of when people took their sick leave,” Mr. Graham recalls. “And we found that something like 60 per cent of leave was taken adjacent to another leave [such as weekends or vacation time]. But the union objected, and we had to stop doing it.”