In this particular situation I think it's laziness. In this situation, from what I've seen, they have every reason to have the capacity internally to hire these workers. It's an easy thing to contract out that work.
They might argue that they have trouble with retention in call centres. I would suggest that they struggle for a few reasons.
One is that the staffing processes the federal government uses are archaic. They're staffing in the way they did in the eighties and it's not the eighties. The workers they're trying to appeal to are from a different era of employees. What I mean by that is the types of questions that get asked and the type of scrutineering that occurs just to get people in the door are inefficient.
There are also not enough resources within human resources internally in the departments. I'll speak for the departments where I represent workers.
Human resources have been slashed for 15 years. There are not even enough people to do the staffing processes internally, so managers who don't have these skill sets are being asked to do staffing competitions and oversee them. They don't have that skill set, the capacity or the resources to do that successfully.
With call centres specifically, we get into the training. Call centres at ESDC probably have some of the worst retention we've seen, and they have the capacity to do better. A lot of that has to do with the type of training and onboarding they do, which, over the last number of years, they've made completely virtual. This was before the pandemic.
Before, people would come in and there would be smaller classes. They'd get more hands-on training and direct and immediate support when they had questions. With the way things are done now, they get feedback maybe six weeks after. If they've been on a call with an EI client, for example, and they've made an error, six weeks later somebody comes to them and asks them if they remember the call six weeks earlier when they made a mistake. Yes, there are problems with that.
I would like to see some reforms in the staffing processes. I'd love to see increased resources given to human resources departments so they can do their roles successfully and take pressure off frontline management. I'd like to see an overhaul of the onboarding and training packages that employees are receiving. Instead of doing the work needed to reform these long-standing practices that are problematic, I think they're choosing the easy response, sometimes by contracting out.