Hundreds of CBC/Radio-Canada employees will see their July income cut by amounts they were overpaid, courtesy of a new pay system already riddled with problems.
At least 430 journalists, producers, technicians and other employees of the public broadcaster had meal and travel allowances mistakenly paid in their June 13 paychecks. Management informed them Thursday that it planned to reduce their two July paychecks to recover the overpayment, which for some totaled thousands of dollars.
“The claim was divided equally to account for employees who received significant hours (SIC) overpayment,” the email, dated Thursday, reads. The duty was able to consult.
It is specified that certain employees must subscribe to an “alternative repayment plan”, those for whom the amounts due exceed their total remuneration for the month of July. The duty was able to reach employees who confirmed having received between a few hundred and $2,000 in excess.
Workday Problem
The massive June mess-up was caused by “an error in the interpretation of time cards” after a recent configuration of Radio-Canada’s payroll system, Workday. “The problem that caused this overpayment is now fixed to avoid situations like this in the future,” assures its spokesperson, Leon Mar, in an email.
Workday is the software the public broadcaster has been using since last year to pay its staff. The Government of Canada has also been testing the software since 2022 in its quest to find a replacement for its flawed Phoenix pay system, which was launched eight years ago.
Ottawa, however, quietly abandoned this option last February, and instead chose its competitor Dayforce, soberly described as “viable”.
CBC/Radio-Canada, as an independent Crown corporation, has its own payroll service. Its employees have reported a range of problems since it made the switch to Workday, with multiple sources telling the Duty have experienced irregularities in the past year. It was precisely by trying to program the software to comply with a chapter of the collective agreement on meal times that hundreds of pay stubs were found to be out of order.
The unions representing CBC/Radio-Canada employees are well aware of the problem. A special committee to look into Workday pay issues was struck in September 2023.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) went so far as to distribute leaflets this spring in stations in Quebec and Moncton, New Brunswick, which read: “Workday: Solve our #$&?%#$* problems.” It denounced the shift to Workday, for which “CBC was simply not ready.”
“Internally, many call it “Worstday” [la pire journée] “, attests the secretary and treasurer of the STTRC, Lise Millette. She calls the new software “Phoenix’s little brother”, in reference to the scandal surrounding the federal Phoenix pay system. “We’ve been dealing with errors and confusion for several months. What happened with the June 13 payroll is just the latest in a list.”
Echoes of Phoenix
Among the union’s long list of complaints against Workday are errors in calculating seniority, missing pay raises and the disappearance of the first half-hour of overtime. When those problems were corrected, others arose.
Mme Millette believes that the plan to recover the overpayments made in June contravenes Radio-Canada’s internal policy, which normally requires it to recover large sums over a longer period. She is calling on all affected members to request a special arrangement with the employer to avoid having a large portion of their salaries cut.
In November, Radio-Canada published a report on the setbacks of the Workday payroll management system at the University of Ottawa. The Californian company Workday did not respond to questions from the Duty at the time of writing.