It has been 2 months since I have talked about What is the Union doing about RTO3? And like you, I have wonder about the progress of the actions taken by our union in regards to Return to Office (RTO) and what happened to the Summer of Discontent?
Recently I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation, a Call to Action, from Nathan Prier the President of CAPE, on what we need to do. Nathan Prier gave real insight on why there hasn’t been an escalation of tactics used by PSAC, CAPE, ACFO, and PIPSC. It is due to the lack of overwhelming majority support by the membership. It is about the ladder of escalation.
What is the ladder of escalation? You need overwhelming support at the lowest effort that provides the least pressure before you escalate to your next tactic and rinse and repeat. You never want to show your aces too early and you need to have a quantifiable way to confirm that you have overwhelming support at your current tactic before you up both the pressure and effort at the next tactic.
Well, what does this really mean? SIGN THE PETITION! Across the Federal Public Service, not enough Public Servants have signed the petition that will go to your MP and Treasury Board President Anita Anand. Although this is an extremely low pressure, it is also extremely low effort on your part so sign the petition and convince a colleague to also sign the petition too. If the union knows that over 300,000 federal public servants signed the petition, they can go to their next tactic then the next one and the next one. But if no one signs the petition, it tells the story that you are okay with being in office 3 days a week and potentially even all 5 days of the week.
What you should do:
- Sign the Petition to appeal the three-day in-office mandate
- Take a short survey: PSAC wants to hear your personal experience with the in-office mandate and how you’re willing to fight back.
- Use digital assets such as Teams meeting backgrounds, social media profiles photos or even a #RemoteWork posters
- Wear forest green in your in-office days to show solidarity with other unions
