RTO: Today's the day
I don't often believe in conspiracy theories, but when I do, they involve shitty transit.
Did I ever tell you I have a Pixar quote generator in my head? Today is the day for the Great Return to Office for public servants and the only thing I have in mind is that scene from Finding Nemo, in the dentist’s office, when the fishies’ plot to escape by fouling up their tank (it’s complicated) is foiled by a new automatic filtration system nobody knew existed. Naturally (as it were), this is making me think of civil servants crowded like sardines on the few rare buses that serve their neighbourhoods, cursing the day they chose to devote their careers to the public good.
I have railed and bitched and yelled against this colossally stupid return to office mandate since, well, the first idiot brought it up. I guess 2022?
On Saturday afternoon I was at a lovely Fourth of July counter-party downtown where a bunch of civil servants crowded around live musicians to indulge in a little day drinking in the sun and would you know it, conversation turned to this nonsense and they were very exercised indeed. Especially the ones with kids who don’t know how they can be downtown early enough to get a parking spot and also get their kids to school for 8:25 in Riverside South because OC Transpo has cancelled their school runs and if you believe there will be yellow buses come September I have a bridge to sell you, and we were all losing our ever-loving minds over the sheer stupidity of it all.
What’s that? Why do people need to be downtown so early? I’m so glad you asked.
Because the New Ways to Bus removed bus routes from their neighbourhoods and that, coupled with the hilariously unpredictable scheduling mess that OC Transpo has become, means there are no reliable buses to take them to the train that’s also not always working and even when it does, it takes them well over an hour for a commute that takes 22 minutes by car. So they drive. But there’s no parking downtown unless you get there before 7 am.
Yeah, well, what else are they supposed to do? Teleport?
Being at the office so early should mean they can leave early, too. Right? Not the people I speak with. They feel they need to be present until most people start to leave (doubly true for management). Result? These people are now giving us 10-hour days for an 8-hour pay.
Woo.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that many federal offices no longer have enough workable space to accommodate all their employees. So we’re making people get downtown on transit that doesn’t work and takes forever (or drive themselves downtown from stupid early to stupid late just so they can find a place to park), give up on taking their kids to school or, I don’t know, having a life outside work, in order to be downtown in a loud and cramped space for no good reason because some old fart somewhere thinks the 1950s should never have ended.
At the risk of having you think I need to wrap my head in tinfoil, I am convinced the only plausible reason to force public servants back to their downtown Ottawa lack of office space using methods of transportation that go nowhere slowly and are incredibly frustrating to boot is to make them give up on the public service and quit their jobs.
Wouldn’t that be an elegant way to thin the ranks of the public service?
At the end of Finding Nemo the fish manage to escape the aquarium only to find themselves floating in the harbour inside ziploc bags, which is just about the stupidest way for fish to be. This morning, many public servants stuck on an unbelievably crammed bus may very well feel the same. And that’s not right.
Finally, someone put into words what I’ve been thinking all along. It’s smaller government. That’s why Doug Ford rushed ahead to make it a 5 day work week in January. He believes in smaller government, so “everybody has got to go back to work, simple as that” was his quote.
Private sector companies who want and need talented people are still doing remote work, the ones who don’t are instituting rto for profit hoping that AI can fill in the gaps because as you say “around 2022” generative AI took the world by storm and leaders saw an opportunity to reduce one of their largest expenditures, salaries and benefits. For the public service at all levels, it’s the same story, e.g. 85% of the Ottawa Police Service’s budget is salaries and benefits.
So here we are. The pandemic gave workers a taste of work life balance and business leaders couldn’t wrap their heads around an invisible workforce that had control of their day. They asked for spyware but that wasn’t good enough, to see results you have to be present in an office. Every bit of evidence shows the opposite. This is not evidence based decision making. So as you put it, it looks like a conspiracy to me too, OC Transpo notwithstanding.