[DRAFT] The Protection of Government Workers Act [PGWA]

Vivanco

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Vivanco
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I bring forth the following modification of the Legal Code regarding the members of the different executive teams that articulate the government in order to provide them protection in their labour.

The Legal Code, Chapter 7, Section 7.1. shall be amended as follows:
Section 7.1: Definitions
2. Executive Officers are government officials appointed by the Delegate to assist in the execution of their duties.
3. Executive Workers are those members of the different sections and ministries that articulate the different actions and procedures of the ministries.
4
. Advisors to the Delegate are government officials appointed by the Delegate who serve only to advise the Delegate, and are exempt from constitutional restrictions on holding multiple government offices for purposes of their appointment.
5. The Serving Delegate is the person holding the constitutionally-mandated elected office of the Delegate or, in the case of a vacancy or absence in that office, the person that has assumed the duties of that office.
6. The WA Delegate is the nation holding the WA Delegacy of the region The North Pacific.
The Legal Code, Chapter 7 shall be amended to add the following new section:
Section 7.9: Workers Rights
53. All Executive Workers under the regional government shall enjoy of the protection under this section, including those deputies assigned by the Ministers.
54. Executive Workers shall not be kicked out of their positions or their membership of the ministries revoked for personal reasons, such as, but not limited to, personal animosity.
55. A Deputy Minister, under the Minister's responsability, will have the capacity to the management of the internal workings of the ministry, under the restrictions and guidelines provided by the Minister.
56. In the case of a removal from membership to the ministry, the Executive Worker shall be contacted one week prior to the removal taking effect with the reasoning of such decision.
57. In the case of a judicial case taking place, the Executive Worker may, under the Minister's or Delegate's discretion have their status of Executive Worker removed until the case is resolved.
58. In the case of the judicial case pardoning the Executive Worker of their charges, their status as member of the ministry shall be reinstated.
59. Any Executive Workers that has been kicked out that feels like the reason is not enough will have the posibility of appealing the decision back to the Ministry.
60. The Ministry shall look into the matter and provide a ruling as soon as posible, to whenever sustain the previous decision or to revoke it and reinstate the member in the ministry.
61. In the case of a second rejection, the rejected may be able to rise the matter up to the Court.
The Legal Code, Chapter 3 shall be amended to add the following new section:
Section 3.5: Labour Trial Procedure
27. A standard procedure for all labour trials will be established by majority agreement of the Court.
28. In order to be able to begin this procedure, the affected worker must have been rejected their previous appeal within the ministry upon the decision of their kick from the ministry. If the case is accepted, the Minister responsable for the appeals shall be one of the parts of the case as defendant. The affected worker shall take the part of claimant.
29. If the defendant accepts to reinstate the claimant back to the ministry, then automatically the case will be considered as withdrawn.
30. When the management of the case is completed, all records associated with it will be transferred to the Court.
 
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I meant to voice my opinion in that post but was driving. I support this. I like the whole idea of it since it's like the Civil Service Reform Act in the US.
 
Yeah, hi, target here. I know this is motivated by the way I reorganized the FA Ministry. I assigned everyone a simple task. Those who complied (Rocketdog, Tlomz, everyone else) stayed. All you had to do was DM me, within the time period I set, that you wished to stay on. You did not. Tough cookies.

On a note about the bill: No. What you're doing here is making participation in Government a right. It is not. The Court has been clear on this in the past.

Additionally, setting aside that. What you've effectively done is constrain the ability of a government to, in a not exactly uncharitable interpretation, rearrange the Ministries of Government. After all, if no worker can be fired, it's not unreasonable to suggest they'd stay in the same spot would it?
 
Yeah, hi, target here. I know this is motivated by the way I reorganized the FA Ministry. I assigned everyone a simple task. Those who complied (Rocketdog, Tlomz, everyone else) stayed. All you had to do was DM me, within the time period I set, that you wished to stay on. You did not. Tough cookies.

On a note about the bill: No. What you're doing here is making participation in Government a right. It is not. The Court has been clear on this in the past.

Additionally, setting aside that. What you've effectively done is constrain the ability of a government to, in a not exactly uncharitable interpretation, rearrange the Ministries of Government. After all, if no worker can be fired, it's not unreasonable to suggest they'd stay in the same spot would it?
To play the devil's advocate, how is requiring ministers to DM you in a fixed time period to stay in the Ministry prohibited by this draft?
 
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Yeah, hi, target here. I know this is motivated by the way I reorganized the FA Ministry. I assigned everyone a simple task. Those who complied (Rocketdog, Tlomz, everyone else) stayed. All you had to do was DM me, within the time period I set, that you wished to stay on. You did not. Tough cookies.
For clarification, you are not the target.
 
In fact, by the way you made the rearrangement of the ministry it would fall on the procedure lied upon the draft. There was a warm before it took place and a reason for the elimination from the executive.
 
I cannot understate how strongly I am against this. This bill would completely prevent a minister from carrying out any sort of root and branch reform in their department, as I am currently doing with the Culture ministry, by turning the relatively simple task of removing staff for poor performance into a Kafkaesque process requiring notice periods, appeals, warnings and a sacrifice to the god of form filling. Such an act would massively complicate the process of keeping staff accountable, which is usually achieved by removing staff who do not complete an extremely simple task within a given time period.
If implemented this act will almost certainly result in one of two outcomes:
  1. We end up with departments that have enough inactive staff to fill the Caspian sea, as ministers are forced to rummage around for active staff like looking for a needle in a haystack or face the onerous and task of giving 1 week warnings, writing individual reasons, hearing appeals and responding to court cases.
  2. We end up with ministers spending 90% of their time jumping through legal hoops to perform what should be a straightforward task such as removing inactive staff, instead of doing their jobs. We will end up with people assigned to the sole role of making sure that all the i's are dotted and t's crossed so that we can get rid of people who aren't doing the most basic parts of their job, we will need to have government administrators to administer the work of other government administrators. Maybe we can give them their own department and call it the 'Department of Administrative Affairs' :P.
This bill is fundamentally a solution in search of a problem - for it seeks to force ministers to either swallow mediocrity or spend hours performing legal gymnastics so that they can get rid of people who aren't doing their jobs. The bill also fails to define 'personal reasons' - is it personal reasons if I fire someone because I feel they are incompetent? What about if they personally insult me - surely the proponent hasn't intended to create a system where staff can give abuse to ministers with 0 consequences? How is personal animosity to be gauged? All the personal animosity clause will achieve is clog the court with cases from staffers who hold a grudge because they were passed over for a promotion or some other perceived slight.
I urge my fellow members of the Regional Assembly to stand against this bill which will do nought but bury ministers under an avalanche of paperwork if they dare to enforce even the most basic of performance of standards. For this a bill that will serve no one but those who wish to encourage mediocrity when we should be seeking excellence.
 
To be told that my bill is an encouragement of mediocrity is something I did not expect.

I will not be continuing to seeing the draft of this bill until tomorrow so I can give a proper response.
 
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I feel like this bill wasn't really focusing inactive staff. This bill essentially would have protected people in the executive government from political persecution by the big wigs in the cabinet. Clearly the cabinet is coming down hard on this because they enjoy politically persecuting individuals.
 
I feel like this bill wasn't really focusing inactive staff. This bill essentially would have protected people in the executive government from political persecution by the big wigs in the cabinet. Clearly the cabinet is coming down hard on this because they enjoy politically persecuting individuals.
Your usual brand of trolling is not appreciated here Kasto. To address solely this point (because I need more time to properly offer feedback on this bill), the Court has already recognized protection for members of the executive staff to avoid precisely the scenarios you’re concerned with and this bill appears to be targeting. So even if we wanted to be able to do this we cannot.
 
Your usual brand of trolling is not appreciated here Kasto. To address solely this point (because I need more time to properly offer feedback on this bill), the Court has already recognized protection for members of the executive staff to avoid precisely the scenarios you’re concerned with and this bill appears to be targeting. So even if we wanted to be able to do this we cannot.
I was being serious btw. I personally believe by the statement I wrote above. You can disregard it as trolling if it helps you sleep better at night.
 
Nitpick: Rather than saying "kicked out of", say "removed from" (Proposed 7.9.54). Try to avoid colloquialisms in bills.
 
I was being serious btw. I personally believe by the statement I wrote above. You can disregard it as trolling if it helps you sleep better at night.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, because if you were sincere, then you’ve offended me and everyone you worked with in government prior to your resignation. You should know better but apparently you don’t. How dare you Kasto, you truly think so little of us? The hell dude…
 
Many of my thoughts on this bill fall into a similar category as Sil's post, and that is easily worked on the same way spelling and grammar are - not the point of the bill, and not worth diving into when covering what we should cover when evaluating the bill itself. This bill as currently written is quite the departure from how the rest of the legal code is written even setting aside phrasing, and this departure is what concerns me most. This starts from the very beginning, when executive workers are defined. The main issue I have with this bill is that it assumes the current system as the default, despite that system not being present in the legal code until this new proposed language. Every delegate has the option to shape the executive as they see fit, so long as a very small core number of mandatory ministries are present. We may not even need to call them "minister" potentially. In the case of the definition, I am not sure "articulate" is the word you want to go with here. I believe the point is to essentially define the executive staff in the legal code - in that case, I would suggest calling them that, the "executive staff," as it is a recognized term that we utilize currently. What does the staff do? I think the definition should make that clearer. But on principle I do not accept codification of the executive staff, because we may not always have one, or we may have something similar that works entirely differently, and our executive government should naturally fit the vision of our chief executive.

We don't even have to get into what constitutes "personal animosity." I think we can rely not only on existing Court precedent protecting the executive staff, but our basic Bill of Rights protections as well. It does make sense, if you are codifying the executive staff, to codify the deputy minister as well, but the trouble here is that deputies in the ministry are very different from deputies in the Speaker's office. They are not government officials and may be utilized in very different ways depending on the ministry. The definition provided here does succeed in accommodating that wide variety, but in the process doesn't really serve much of a purpose except to be specifically mentioned. I am not sure what that clause is actually adding to the bill.

We then fall into the over-regulation section. I am not sure what a one week notice is doing - I can think of situations where notice was much shorter by necessity, and I do not see flexibility considered here. Roll calls and advance warnings are commonplace enough but they are not guaranteed, and sometimes not warranted. If there is cause to remove a member of staff, then there should be no consideration for an arbitrary warning window. I will just say that the judicial review is not needed for similar reasons mentioned before - government official action is subject to judicial review, and even if it was not a government official, an r4r could still be filed. I actually am not sure the appeal process makes sense. I am loathe to complicate this bill even further, but if the minister removes someone from staff, they should no be responsible for reviewing their own decision - appeals should properly be heard by a separate party that can serve as a check on the party who performed the action. I can imagine they would likely uphold their own decision, causing the Court to be the last resort anyway.

When envisioning these Court cases, what do you think it will look like? Someone on staff is removed from the staff and takes issue with that removal, so they take it to Court? As we saw when abc tried this in 2019, it is already entirely possible for this to happen. Usually when a bill is proposed, there is some notion of what inspired it, or what it is aiming to fix or improve. I find that motivation lacking in your proposal. This appears to be an inspired labor rights promotion bill imagining protection from unjust termination of employment and a judicial mechanism to alleviate it. But I do not know where it fits into how TNP currently conducts itself. I'm not surprised Boston assumed this was in response to a move he made, I think Wym or even myself can all point to examples of things we think led to this bill, but only you can explain what it is you're trying to do and why. I think that would help some people understand where this is coming from and how to shoot for a legislative solution that we can all get behind.

I said earlier I am against codifying the executive staff on principle. However, the executive staff has existed for years, has been continued by every subsequent delegate, and is an established and recognized part of our government system. Perhaps some feel it has earned firmly rooting itself in our laws as a result, or perhaps recent reminders of how easily it can be eliminated cause concern for some. There could therefore be some value in a debate as to whether or not we should establish it in our law. Your bill doesn't do that directly, it does it by default by embedding assumptions about its existence into the legal code. I think if this were to be pursued in a serious way, it would have to be by directly establishing the staff itself. Then we can worry about what protections would also have to be codified, or what extent we can rely on the protections inherent in our law and controlling Court rulings.
 
This is a bad idea. The whole appeals process is overly bureaucratic, and the requirement of a week of notice prior to removal from a ministry ignores situations in which the individual needs to be removed immediately. Additionally, service in the executive staff is not a right.
 
Others have stated it more clearly, but I too am opposed for the numerous reasons already presented.
 
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