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Vancouver city employees, especially firefighters, suffer from poor morale: survey

The Vancouver skyline from Stanley Park.

It used to be that landing a job with "the city" was thought of as a ticket to easy street. It brought good pay and benefits, a promising career track if you were ambitious, a secure position if you weren't.

But public service isn't what it used to be. Just ask federal civil servants labouring under their cost-cutting unsympathetic Conservative taskmasters. And working for the city appears to be a downer, too, at least in Vancouver.

Results of a survey, obtained by the Vancouver Sun, show morale among Vancouver's 10,000 municipal workers remains low despite the city's promises to change the employment culture.

The survey conducted last year by the Hay Group found the results differed little from a similar one done in 2010, the Sun said. Morale remains low, as does confidence in the city's direction.

While the results improved in some areas, things have worsened in critical areas of stress and workload, the Sun said. In the case of the Vancouver Fire Department, only six per cent of respondents had confidence in the fire chief and his managers.

[ Related: Clement says poor performers hurt public service morale ]

It's the second survey conducted since Mayor Gregor Robertson, founder of the Happy Planet organic fruit-juice producer and former New Democrat MLA, led the Vision Vancouver civic party to electoral victory in 2008.

The 2010 survey revealed high levels of mistrust of city management, though most said they were otherwise happy and productive, the Sun reported. About 50 per cent of civic workers responded to the 2010 survey, compared with 48 per cent for the one last summer.

City manager Penny Ballem told the Sun she was happy with the results, which she said show the specific, targeted efforts launched after the 2010 survey, including clarifying the city's direction and improving leadership skills among managers and unionized supervisors, are working.

In a memo to city council about the survey last November, human resources general manager Paul Mochrie pointed to improvements of between three and seven percentage points in eight areas, with the biggest change in how workers related to their immediate supervisors.

But the Sun noted those gains would be statistically insignificant in a public opinion poll with standard margins of error. And they contrast sharply with an overwhelmingly negative attitude toward leadership and on whether the city has a "clear and promising direction." It's also well below public-sector norms benchmarked by the Hay Group, the Sun said.

Blame can't necessarily be laid at the feet of Robertson's Vision team, the Sun said. Relations between the city and its employees have been rocky for years, partly because of lengthy, bitter strikes in the 1990s and 2007.

[ Related: What's behind rising public service absenteeism? ]

The problem is especially acute at the fire department, where firefighters have been without a contract for two years and members have called openly for Fire Chief John McKearney to be turfed.

Just 16 per cent of firefighters surveyed said they felt the department had a "clear and promising direction," down from about 25 per cent in 2010. Only six per cent had confidence in the department's leadership, compared with 13 per cent in the previous survey and down 55 points from corporate norms used by the Hay Group.

Uncertainty is a morale killer, especially in the public service where stability reigned historically.

CBC News reported in 2012 that the Conservative government's push to downsize the federal public service was contributing to a spike in absenteeism due to illness or long-term disability.