Sick days for municipal workers climb under Coderre administration
Blue collar workers top absentee rates for illness, police officers see sharpest increase
For every 100 scheduled hours, Montreal city employees are missing almost six due to illness, according to documents obtained by Radio-Canada.
The numbers show that despite the administration's efforts to cut down on sick days at the City of Montreal, absenteeism due to illness rose to 5.93 per cent for the first three months of 2016, compared to 5.7 per cent last June.
That's an increase of just over four per cent in nine months.
The rate is calculated as the number of hours employees miss for illness, including long-term and short-term medical leave, compared to the total number of scheduled hours.
According to Statistics Canada, the average absentee rate for illness in Quebec in 2015 — for both the public and private sectors — was 3.9 per cent.
Blue collar workers are near the top of the list among Montreal municipal workers, with an absentee rate for illness of 9.44 per cent, up from 8.48 per cent last year — an increase of more than 11 per cent.
Police officers have a better attendance rate, but they also saw a much sharper increase compared to last year's figures.
Their absentee rate was 3.38 per cent last year and 5.27 per cent for the first three months of 2016 — an increase of nearly 56 per cent.
Firefighters are at 4.19 per cent for this year compared to 3.73 per cent last year.
Not motivating employees
The City of Montreal has made reducing sick days one of its main administrative priorities for this year, but opposition councillors say the Coderre administration has struggled to make an impact.
Absentee rates due to illness have increased every year that Mayor Denis Coderre has been in office, from 4.24 per cent in 2013 to 5.93 per cent this year.
"The mayor is not succeeding at motivating employees to come to work," said Laurence Lavigne-Lalonde, Projet Montréal's economic critic. "He's opted for confrontation instead of valuing [employees], and we can see that it's a failure."
City officials in talks with unions
City of Montreal officials say absenteeism is a matter they take seriously, and they are in talks with union leaders.
"Reducing absenteeism is one of the priorities of the administration," said Pierre Desrochers, chairman of the city's executive committee. "We are in discussions with all the unions and it is one of the major elements we are discussing."
Desrochers also told Radio-Canada that the city will take a closer look at the figures to ensure the health and safety of all its city employees.
"In this specific case, we will carefully have to analyse all the numbers, understand them and know what we need to work on."
with files from Radio-Canada's François Cormier