Released on August 12, 2015 @ 21:00 EDT
Tag #: 681

Human Resources: Denial, Cover up and gross incompetence

Bigger already doomed. Gravy train continually running through City hall.
Legal fees scam continues. Fowke and Canapini behind the scheme

Bigger: Already doomed

Canapini: Bad legal advise , Fowke: Incompetent and negligent

Kevin Fowke, director of human resources, is continually engaging in his favourite "sweet deals" with the Toronto-based legal firm, for labour and employment matters. The gravy train is continually running through City hall.

Recently another human rights application (2014 HRTO 410) was filed against Fowke and other corrupted bureaucrats. Many of the City’s employees have taken this route to address their issues, as a  "statement case", to express their concern about City Hall's corrupted practices but are not seeking resolution through the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Historically, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal has dismissed these applications due to lack of code ground. As the Tribunal has it, they declare that discrimination falls into bullying or unfair treatment. During the last decade 99.8% of applications were dismissed. Furthermore, the Tribunal has no jurisdiction over labour and employment matters. After reviewing applications it is common practice to issue a "Notice of Intent to Dismiss" (“NOID”). Traditionally, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal pay their special interest into matters related to sexual harassment and disability issues. Most importantly, the administrative tribunal, such as the Ontario Human Rights tribunal, has very limited jurisdiction over issues and has no power to determine discrimination related to labour and employment matters. Additionally, it is completely unnecessary to hire a lawyer for Human Rights Tribunal matters.

Despite these facts, Fowke did not analyse neither the data nor the nature of the cases and continually hired Toronto-based lawyer, Mireille Khoraych, to represent him. A large sum of tax dollars was scammed in this way. This habitual practice of his, added an additional burden on the city’s budget. Fowke also retained Khoraych’s services for a recent human right case against him (2014 HRTO 410). Her services were once again paid for by use of tax dollars. Fowke sought out this unnecessary use of legal services without even considering the traditional Tribunal decision to send a  "Notice of Intent to Dismiss" (“NOID”).

Neoptism
Khoraych behind the scam

Khoraych : City's cover-up lawyer

The legal service department of the city consists of four lawyers and 11 staff members and costs taxpayers 1.2 million dollars annually. In addition to this, Fowke was surrounded by six human resources coordinators, yet he neglected to utilize any of them to appear before the Human Rights Tribunal. With this attitude, Fowke (not surprisingly but unforgivably) spent over $400,000.00 in the 2014 year for labour and employment matters. Furthermore, the City paid over 8 million dollars for a Sudbury based legal firm. WikiLeaks Sudbury will not disclose any identifiable information of Toronto and Sudbury based legal firms to protect third party economic interests.

The Bigger administration is henceforth struggling to save tax dollars and is heavily engaged in the P6M project to save 6 million tax dollars. Fowke and Canapini, on the other hand, have no respect for tax dollars and large amounts of tax dollars have been wasted on their behalf. The recent case (2014 HRTO 410) is an exemplary fact that proves their incompetence as well as the unstoppable gravy train coursing through city hall.

The Bigger administration must take swift action against those corrupted practices without any further delays. Corrupted city hall bureaucrats have slipped by under the radar unscathed and undisturbed for long enough. Taxpayers deserve change and bureaucrats such as Fowke must step down without wasting any more precious tax dollars.

---------------------------------------------------- End

Editorial
Released on August 19, 2015 @ 17:00

This research initially published on Public Administration and Development, 35, 113-127, (2015). Brief review and excerpts of the article follows.

Human resources management : Organizational and worker performance

Human resources management (HRM) is critical to strengthening institutions and performance by attracting and retaining well-qualified and talented people to work on key issues and ensuring that leaders’ efforts contribute to organizational and worker performance. Human resources management concerns organizational practices and knowledge that address the relationship between the individual and the organization with an eye to optimizing effectiveness from the view of both the organization and individual.

The lack of clear roles between senior public managers quickly undermines efforts of bureaucratic leadership and is often accompanied in development settings by officials’ corruption, resulting in further leadership deficiencies and corruption to permeate through bureaucracies.

Strategic HRM is defined as an approach to HRM that is concerned with long-term people issues and macro concerns that directly or indirectly contribute to public performance. Examples include leadership development, the pipeline of talented employees and supervisors for future senior positions, and the role of political officials and patronage appointments in giving direction to government units.

An important leadership task is ensuring civil servants’ enthusiasm for mission and performance, and getting beyond de minimis compliance/obedience motivation that are sometimes seen in public agencies. In recent years, the term “employee engagement” has become a popular, practice-based term, denoting employees who apply themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during their performance. The term employee “engagement” bridges internal states of motivation with observable behaviours in the workplace and is linked to increased performance and productivity. An engaged employee can be characterized as enthusiastic and energetic about his or her work, but a one of the researcher survey of 140 countries finds high levels of employee engagement rather uncommon. The concept of “engagement” is different from public service motivation (PSM) which addresses employees’ intrinsic motivation for the “public” character of public sector pursuits, rather than their energetic pursuit of these; researchers state that “PSM alone does necessarily lead to improved performance,” requiring other HRM practices, indeed. PSM became popularized in the 1990s before the above emphasis that bridges motivation to workplace behaviour.

Human resources management is obviously focused on engagement on productivity, and past lessons strongly point to multi-pronged approaches. Money matters, but the evidence on performance-based pay is inconclusive at best. Supervisory relations matter greatly (it is said that people join organizations and causes but quit their supervisors), but so, too, do job security and career development opportunities. Engagement research points to feeling valued and being meaningfully involved in decisions. Hence, SHRM frameworks use comprehensive HR systems that reinforce behaviour and incentives. For example, high-performance work systems (HPWS) in HRM, which are associated with increased productivity and performance, emphasize the following: (1) employment security; (2) high selectivity in hiring new personnel; (3) using self managed teams and decentralization of decision making as the basic principles of organizational design; (4) competitive compensation contingent on organizational performance; (5) extensive training; (6) extensive sharing of performance information throughout the organization; and (7) reduced status distinctions and barriers in organizations. There are no single bullets, and the trend is towards comprehensive strategies that are implemented with sustained commitment over time.

The time has come for creative experimentation and intellectual framing of the management challenge. Public agencies require leadership by political appointees and senior public managers alike; there are many leadership tasks to be undertaken. Many years ago, one of the researcher stated that the “imperative is to institutionalize planning at all levels of management, so that it becomes a prime element of every manager’s work.” The challenge is doing so at the highest levels. First, political leadership is needed that focuses on a small but salient number of politically relevant priorities, and, second, public manager leadership is needed that develops and executes strategic plans in all divisions, subject to political accountability from bureaucrats.  Agency leadership is distributed in nature and requires an assessment of whether it is sufficiently occurring, hence involving greater attention to role expectations for political appointees and senior officials.  

Editor
WikiLeaks Sudbury
August 2015

Related document

Human resources management : Organizational and worker performance

Reference