'Our audit highlights opportunities to implement monitoring and accountability processes and strengthen supervision to improve crew productivity'
City crews that are supposed to be maintaining Toronto's parks are logging longer hours than they are actually working, according to a recent report from the Toronto auditor general.
The audit reviewed 564 daily logs across the four districts and the wterfront and found that 13% were not signed off and 28% did not indicate what activities were performed at one or more park locations.
Also, in a review of 85 daily logs against available vehicle GPS information:
- 75% of daily logs where GPS indicates the time in/time out at many locations was not accurate
- 46% of daily logs where GPS indicates crews did not stop at one or more park locations
- 87% of daily logs where crews stopped at one or more City/park locations not recorded in the daily log, where there is no way to determine from the log whether any park maintenance was actually performed at the stop
Previously, HRD reported on whether it is legal to track employees using GPS.
The report also detailed disparities in parks workers’ reporting of hours that they worked:
Source: Toronto Auditor General
"There's a lot of really fantastic city staff out there. A lot of them work really hard – but these numbers are quite damning," Coun. Brad Bradford said, according to a CBC report.
"At the end of the day, you've gotta show up and do the job that you're being paid for."
Meanwhile, the auditor general criticized the system that is in place to monitor parks workers hours and activities.
“During this audit, we observed that the Parks Branch does not regularly monitor whether its service level standards are achieved,” said the Toronto auditor general in the report.
“While management and staff have indicated that the Parks Branch considers factors such as classification/size, location, usage (including unintended types of usage) of the park when implementing operational maintenance service level standards, because of the manual, paper-based records and limitations in the quality and reliability of information captured, we were unable to readily determine how consistently minimum services levels were met or exceeded.”
Employees' working hours at home are being collected by almost half of enterprises, and more employers are likely to follow suit, according to a previous report.
Recommendations for Toronto parks workforce
The Toronto auditor general’s report made several recommendations, including:
- full use of the GPS technology “to improve parks maintenance crew productivity and to help plan, assign and monitor work”
- reinforcement of clear guidelines and allowances for acceptable stop times, break times, and the valid operational reasons for taking these stops and breaks
- additional training to ensure staff consistently following operational policies and procedures
- supervisory staff conducting thorough reviews of Daily Activity Sheets
- digitalizing and modernizing processes, adopting technology-enabled tools
- strengthening supervision, monitoring and quality assurance processes over park maintenance activities
“Implementing the nine recommendations in the report will enable the Parks Branch to improve its scheduling, tracking, and monitoring processes for parks maintenance, improve crew productivity and supervision of parks maintenance activities, and help in achieving service level standards reliably and consistently across all city parks,” said the Toronto auditor general.
In the spring of 22, Bill 88, Working for Workers Act, 2022, received Royal Assent and became law. Among other things, Bill 88 amended Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, 2000 (ESA) to require certain employers to ensure, within a specific time frame, that they have a written policy in place for all employees with respect to electronic monitoring of employees.
CUPE Local 416 President Eddie Mariconda said in a statement to CBC News that while the audit highlights "important issues," it also "reflects just one aspect of a much larger picture.
"Our members often face significant challenges at work, including operational gridlock and broken-down equipment," Mariconda said, according to the CBC report. "Despite these obstacles, we are extremely proud in what our members do to keep Toronto parks clean and beautiful.
"We are committed to addressing the concerns raised in the audit during our upcoming bargaining sessions with the City of Toronto, focusing on practical solutions that support our members."
