Ontario registered practical nurses tell health minister they're not being 'fairly compensated'
CBC
The union representing registered practical nurses in Ontario says it's optimistic following a meeting with the provincial health minister Monday to discuss issues affecting front-line health-care workers — including how much they get paid.
But Katha Fortier, UNIFOR's assistant national president responsible for health care, said she knows that "change doesn't come easy."
Fortier said registered practical nurses (RPNs), who "have been bearing a heavy load during the pandemic," are not getting paid enough for the work they do.
"The last two years have been a strain, and if anyone thinks that nurses are okay, they're sadly mistaken. Nurses are not okay," Fortier told CBC News.
The meeting with Health Minister Christine Elliott comes as the pandemic continues to put pressure on Ontario's health-care system. Although hospitalizations and intensive care admissions continue to drop as the Omicron variant wanes, RPNs are still working long hours and doing jobs they're not used to performing due to staff shortages and COVID-19-related absences.
"They have worked through what is essentially a humanitarian crisis and whether they're working in a hospital or a long- term care facility, in a retirement home, they've worked in workplaces that are in crisis," Fortier said.
"They've worked under emergency orders that supersede their collective agreement rights. So, that means their vacation can be cancelled, they can be forced to work overtime, they can be reassigned to a unit they're unfamiliar with or even redeployed to another facility," she added.
"Registered practical nurses generally are not really fairly compensated, there's a wide range to that compensation, and so we really wanted to talk to the minister about a standard wage, whether you worked in a hospital, whether you work in long term care or home care," Fortier said.
"And we wanted to talk about good working conditions for nurses," she said, adding that long-term care homes and hospitals are pressuring RPNs to work overtime while denying them full-time jobs.
Tracy Holmes, a nurse in London, Ont., said RPNs are called upon to do a wider range of jobs than ever, but their level of compensation has not changed.
"We are finding that people are quite upset about the wage. The wage has not increased with their skill, there's been no recognition to that increase of skill," she told CBC News.
"People are working long hours and struggling to get breaks and struggling to get time off. It's just, it's not been a good place to be for anybody."
Holmes said "people are tired, they're exhausted, it's hard to get time off and people are just genuinely frustrated."
Allison Lewis, an RPN in Fergus, Ont., said "morale is really at an all-time low for anybody in health care."