Ponga said:
Reality- Jan 6, 2015:
...“You have casual employees brought in within a short time with little training while qualified people are shown the door, and the public is left with people who are not on top of their job,” he said.
According to the union, casual employees make up half the workforce responsible for the reviews of permanent residence applications. These employees, mostly students, are given three days of training on the department's global case management system (GCMS) and rotate on three shifts. ...
I'm skeptical the problem is due to "students with 3 days of training" handling our cases.
That sounds like stereotypical dinosaur union talking about changes being made that give the union less power and privileges than it is used to.
That's also the feeling I get when I read the portion talking about how difficult it is to cope with regulations that change bi-weekly.
When I inquired why a paid service is so backlogged and inefficient, I was told that highly skilled people handle these cases and that new hires can't do the job until fairly late in the game. So it's not easy to hire the kinds of people they put on the job. Of course I don't believe that entirely.
I doubt these jobs are any more special than the jobs you or I do. I'm sure we have a lot of professionals on this forum, and I'm sure a lot of us understand the state of unions in Canada, particularly government unions.
It's pathetic that operations would cease for 3 months because they decided to move operations to a different facility. Real companies make provisions so dramatic effects don't occur because a facility moved. Have you ever told a customer that they would have to wait an additional 3 months for their product because you decided to stop all work while moving to a new office? This happens directly following a strike? Is that a joke?
I will never trust anything a "union leader" says, ever. All they care about is protecting their cash cow, so of course they want us to believe that hiring new, young, workers is causing the sky to fall.
One problem is certainly the union, which forces the process to be more expensive and less efficient than it should be. This means less cash to hire new people, less accountability (and more errors), less process improvement, etc.
If there is a second problem with the under-trained student workers (poaching jobs from the overly entitled union), then hiring these "students" full time would remedy the issue, especially after a month or two (in contrast to the 16 months we're waiting for AIP).
Of course, I doubt these students are operating at any level other than clerk, and any real decision making is likely left to qualified individuals.
But, in the union's eyes, this clerk should be a tenured due-paying union member with 7 weeks of vacation and 4 bankable sick-weeks per year instead of a low-wage earning student with no benefits. So of course they're going to blame everything on the student.
My opinion is that the entire process is flawed and prone to errors. Every single part.
