Doug Ford says he does not want to impose vaccine mandates on healthcare workers for fear that many will quit. The fact is that far more have already quit because of the rotten pay and work conditions his government has already imposed on their profession.
Politicians of all stripes have heaped praise on nurses throughout the pandemic emergency. But talk is cheap.
In Alberta the Kenney UCP government tried to claw back nurses’ wages by up to 5%. Popular opposition, along with all his other public health disasters, forced him to backtrack. But a wage freeze remains, and in a period of inflation that amounts to a rolling pay cut. As a result nurses are leaving the profession (and some are quitting the province entirely).
In Ontario Doug Ford’s Tories used Bill 124, the COVID emergency bill, to scrap nurses’ contracts and put a cap on wages. After months of stress, overwork and loss of control over work conditions, nurses are leaving the profession in droves.
According to CUPE rep Mike Hurley, up to 87% of nurses say they may quit after the pandemic because of the pay freeze, the risk of violence they face on the job, the chronic lack of quality PPE, and understaffing.
Across the country, nursing has been a down-graded profession. Jobs with regular, predictable schedules are rare. Exhausting, long shifts push nurses to the limit. Forced overtime is used to fill the gaps.
Politicians like Kenney and Ford spread half-truths and misinformation. Kenney’s propaganda machine tried to portray nurses as greedy and overpaid. They neglect to mention that the few nurses that earned more than $100,000 did so because of the overtime they were forced to work.
Ford brags he is creating positions for 1000s of new healthcare workers and nurses. He doesn’t mention that experienced, highly educated nursing specialists are being replaced by grads from community college and private school programs that offer 6-weeks of on-line instruction. These so-called “micro diplomas” crank out people with “micro credentials”.
This a concerted stealth attack on public health care. It is a way to turn a respected, good-paying, socially productive profession into minimum wage work without pensions or benefits. If Tory governments cannot abolish and privatize public healthcare head on, they are content to hollow it out through legislation like Bill 124.
Nurses fight back
Most enter the nursing profession because they want to help people in need. And especially in the midst of a public health emergency it is difficult for them to take collective action to defend their jobs. But the provocations from employers and governments have become so extreme that nurses are saying “No more!”
As I write nurses in Quebec are working to rule in protest over forced, mandatory overtime. One spokesperson for nurses told the CBC: “We never know what time we are going to leave work. It has an impact on our families, it has an impact on the overall [health] network.... There's no more patience. It's over.”
In Alberta rallies by nurses and health workers led the opposition to Kenney’s disastrous health care decisions.
And in Ontario, nurses have begun to march and protest to defend their jobs and our healthcare.
If you value your healthcare, now is the time to show solidarity with the workers who are the backbone of our system, our nurses. Good jobs for them means good healthcare for the rest of us.
