City of Edmonton overtime costs up 75% since 2018: audit

An audit at the City of Edmonton has found the corporation paid out 75 per cent more in overtime costs in 2022 than it did five years ago.

The City paid $39 million in overtime in 2022, three per cent of the $1.165 billion that went towards all personnel costs. Edmonton Police Service personnel costs were not included in the audit.

The audit found some departments weren’t analyzing overtime trends to identify underlying causes and that some supervisors were not using all the tools available to reduce the need for and frequency of overtime shifts.

“Overtime is a legitimate business tool and should not be eliminated, but it can be managed,” reads the audit.

It also found the overtime was not distributed evenly across employees.

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The top 20 overtime earners were listed in the report. One employee nearly doubled their salary by working, on average, 18 hours of overtime a week.

Many of the top overtime earners had been in the top 20 multiple times over the past years, with two being top earners for each of the last five years.

The audit described a department where there were four employees who all had the same job and all worked over 650 hours of overtime last year. Three of the employees had been top overtime earners multiple times in the past five years, working an average of 2.5 hours of overtime every day.

“Overtime in this area is caused by needing to fill shifts on an ongoing basis — not because of seasonal work,” the audit said.

Excessive overtime runs the risk of overworking employees and can be an irresponsible use of public funds, according to the audit.

More than 80 per cent of the overtime was racked up in the city operations department, made up of waste services, fleet and facility services, parks and roads services and Edmonton Transit Service, according to the report.

Steve Bradshaw, the president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 569 said low wages make it hard to recruit bus drivers, meaning more overtime is required and that can affect workers.

“When it’s constant overtime – hundreds, thousands of hours of overtime – that’s affecting a person’s work-life balance,” said Bradshaw. “If they want to get their overtime rates down, hire more people, it’s that simple.”

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On top of that, some operators face situations Bradshaw calls traumatic, leading in part to sick days and other paid leave — the city spent $74 million on that last year.

“Absolutely there’s burnout, particularly in areas that are high stress,” he said.

Ward pihêsiwin councillor Tim Cartmell said overtime is one of many tools to use when a team has to get work done, and it can be a temporary patch when extra manpower is needed, in contrast to the more permanent tool of hiring another worker.

“When you add a position at the City of Edmonton, it’s very hard to lose that position down the road,” said Cartmell, adding union rules are part of that challenge. “It could simply be that people are trying to make do with the personnel they already have and not necessarily add positions, (not knowing) if this is a long term, permanent piece of work that needs to be done,” he said.

Cartmell added he’s not overly alarmed at the audit.

“I don’t want to see more money spent that doesn’t absolutely need to be spent, but a number of those other choices could be more expensive in the long run,”

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The report recommended that departments periodically review and report on their overtime monitoring and management practices. Management approved the recommendation.

There was also problems noted in the audit in the earned days off (EDO) program, which allows some employees to earn extra days off by increasing the number of hours worked each day.

Last year there were 2,350 employees in the EDO program.

Almost 60 employees of the 1,000 analyzed used more EDOs than they were entitled to in 2022, the audit said.

This can be explained because of confusion and inconsistent messaging around whether employees can carry EDOs from one year to the next and when the EDOs have to be used by, reads the audit.

“Emails from Employee Services, the City’s intranet, the management employee terms and conditions, and the Civic Services Union 52 Collective Agreement … are not consistent or always understood by employees,” the audit said.

Additionally, almost all departments did not track employees’ EDOs on an annual basis, according to the report.

Following the report recommendations, city management have agreed to train staff to better track EDOs.

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