The union representing thousands of public servants at the
Canada Revenue Agency
is slamming it for a longstanding moratorium on administrative conversions of contract workers to permanent positions.
The Union of Taxation Employees is calling for an end to the two-year moratorium, one of the longest in the tax agency’s history, saying it keeps workers “in a state of perpetual job insecurity.”
The moratorium affects term employees who work on contract and who have less job security than the indeterminate staff that retain more protections through the workforce adjustment process.
The UTE says the CRA has more than 9,000 term employees, and around 5,000 of them have not accumulated any time towards their administrative conversions due to the moratorium.
The union also warns that the moratorium impacts recruitment and retention as public servants look for off-ramps because of the precarious nature of their jobs.
“All this forces the agency to hire many new employees with no experience and to spend a fortune on training,” a UTE media release said.
Productivity impacts and employee morale are also unforeseen impacts from the moratorium, the union warned.
“People are fed up with working from contract to contract or having their contracts not renewed,” Marc Brière, national president of the UTE, said in the news release. “That’s no way to treat workers, especially for an employer that prides itself on putting people first.”
Last year, the CRA struggled with service delivery as it shed thousands of workers to meet budgetary demands.
The CRA also pointed to the axing of tax programs from the Justin Trudeau era in government for the culling of thousands of positions from the tax agency.
However, those struggles caused the current federal government to launch a
100-day review
to get the tax agency back on track.
It’s unclear when the moratorium might be lifted as the CRA faces further budget pressures from Mark Carney government’s spending review.
The Ottawa Citizen contacted the Canada Revenue Agency for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
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