The federal government says there may not be enough room in some offices for all workers as the public service prepares to return to the office four days a week starting July 6.

Civil servants currently only have to come into the office three days a week — a rule that was put in place in September 2024 as government employees were for the most part working remotely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this month, the federal government announced it expects employees who haven't done so already to return to in-office work for a minimum of four days a week starting this July. Government executives will be expected in the office five days.

In a French-language statement emailed this week to Radio-Canada, the Treasury Board of Canada said that Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) will work closely with organizations to ensure "adequate office space" is available for staff.

If a job can be done remotely, that means office spaces are just prison cells. Let this archaic capitalist enslavement end already.

I have a core memory from a a course I was doing as COVID lockdowns were kicking off.

Student: "How will I know my employees are working from home?"

Prof: "How do you know they're working from the office?"

Exactly. When i used to work an office job, I swear I'd be doing 1 hour worth of work and the rest of the day I'd be miserably looking at the time and waiting for the day to end so I could go meet my friends to get drunk or drugged up. It was a vicious depressing cycle.

Why are taxpayers paying for office buildings that have been proven are not necessary ?

I don't work for the government but I feel the "make decisions and then figure out the details later, maybe" deep in my bones lol.

I wonder if a good old fashioned "work-to-rule" would make a difference or if it's too risky with the workforce adjustment ongoing.

What is work to rule?

It's basically group malicious compliance as job action. The employees find all the workplace rules that are on paper that no one actually fully follows ("drivers must check oil level before heading on a delivery") and then doing each and every one to its most obnoxious version (so a driver takes time to check the oil level between every delivery, even though they checked the oil already at the start of the day). As a result productivity suffers, and pressure is on management to concede something.

Let it be outsourced already as well, so we can lower interest rates and feed the housing that makes up the real economy of Canada.

There isn’t enough space for three days a week.

Think of the landlords /s

I remember CEOs going on national TV to whine about employees working from their couch. They don't give a shit if we're working. They're paying to have control over us.

In addition to the other reply it means no longer putting in extra effort, and making the problems they face by following the rules managements problem.

For example, an employee might come to the office and find no open desks. They might have considered going back home and putting in a whole days work there, but work to rule could could mean alerting their supervisor that there are no available desks and ask how they should proceed. Refuse to work in conditions that don't meet ergonomic guidelines, take your time to set up work spaces to meet the guidelines if this is possible, spend the last bit of the day booking the next days in office locations, etc. Turn off your phone when the work day is over and don't look at your laptop after hours. If most of your day is spent dealing with hotelling, well that sure does suck - maybe they could make it easier for you to get your job done by removing these barriers?

If following the rules is a giant pain in the ass, you can make it your employers problem pretty fast. This works best if in a union and if organized as a union action.

This is the stupidest shit I've ever heard.

People want to punish federal workers because they think they're lazy, and they have to go to the office, so we're doing this fucking dumb-ass half baked thing.

This.

Let output be the measure of productivity. If the work is getting done, who cares where it’s being done.

Hint: managers who can’t walk around micromanaging people.

Do worry, the solution will be fire a bunch of workers.

I think its the housing bubble they actually care about, government workers are the only employment still growing in Canada, if they can work from anywhere who will bid up asset values?

how about 3 days a week and two shifts and have the offices open 6 days a week for the public.

Our government quietly agrees without /s :(

There is an underlying issue here that corporate doesn't really do landlords as a separate entity. These properties have been considered safe investments for decades, if this market collapses thousands of billions of corporate asset will have to be depreciated. Not to mention whole industries that hinge on people actually going to an office.

It's a global case of dismissing objective reality and forcing luddite policies because unfathomable amounts of assets have been exposed to be factually near pointless and valueless.

"Back to office" orders are a move of the global oligarchy to protect their assets and should be seen as an attack on the populace, an attempt to continue stealing from us just as before.

How about working from home becoming the new norm? It saves companies tons of money on things like renting office space and furniture to have their staff have some work from home time.

Not here. They're laying off people for austerity. This is the most blue orange government ever.

As a metric that’s going to fuck up peoples idea of how we’re doing with our invested age pyramid.

It doesn't even need to be malicious.

In teaching, they could simply just not do after hour extra curricular activities, but still just do their job normally otherwise.

It really depends on the setting though.

This is the way.

Its still growing according to stats I've seen, otherwise our unemployment would have been worse.