Negotiating teams take different paths towards same goal
While your General Support Services (GSS) negotiating team accepted the employer’s offer to delay bargaining until March 31, 2021 in exchange for limited job protections, your Nursing Care (NC) team decided to proceed to the bargaining table.
Covenant Health has made it clear that they will follow Alberta Health Services’ lead and privatize the delivery of support services like laundry, food service and housekeeping. This will have devastating effects on the workers currently performing these roles and on the communities in which they live.
‘You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone’ isn’t just a line from a great old song. Over these next few months, it’s vital that all members talk to our co-workers and neighbours about the double-whammy this government’s plans are going to have on our workplaces and our communities.
When the housekeeping aide’s job has been contracted out and the private contractor is nowhere to be found, ask your co-workers who they think is going to be asked to step in to fill the void? When a problem is discovered with food service in the middle of the night or on a holiday and the private contractor a hundred kilometres away isn’t picking up the phone, who is going to be left to manage the chaos involved with meeting patients’ needs?
And what about our communities? Unlike Jason Kenney’s massive tax cuts to profitable, multinational corporations, we know that every dollar taken out of a worker’s pocket is another dollar taken out of the local economy.
The laundry worker at Our Lady of the Rosary Hospital in Castor or at St. Joseph’s in Vegreville will spend their hard-earned income in local stores and pay their property taxes to those municipalities. The shareholders of the multi-national corporation that takes over laundry services never will.
Your GSS negotiating team, working with AUPE organizing staff will use this brief reprieve from bargaining and the threat of impending layoffs to work on organizing members worksite- by-worksite.
As your NC negotiating team prepares to head back to the table, they, too, plan to work in conjunction with AUPE’s Anti-Privatization and Committee on Political Action (COPA) Standing Committees to highlight the important work members do and just how much they contribute to Alberta’s economic and social well-being.
All members should remember that wage and benefit rollbacks are still on the table for those who manage to avoid the privatization of their jobs and it’s in all of our best interests to stand together to fight back against these attacks on our livelihoods and reckless cuts to our public health care system.
Your NC negotiating team is scheduled to meet with the employer on January 25th and 26th.
Covenant Health GSS Negotiating Team
Lorie Christenson, lcc44local40@hotmail.com
Corey Kucher, cjkucher@gmail.com
Christee Langkamp, christee7@gmail.com
Covenant Health NC Negotiating Team
Local 040
Kathy Bandmann, kbandmann@hotmail.com
Bev Hill, bhill3095@gmail.com
Local 046
Mary Watson, maynayvatson@hotmail.com
Laura Johnstone, johnstone_laura@hotmail.com
AUPE Resource Staff
Chris Dickson, Negotiator - c.dickson@aupe.org
Madelaine Sommers, Organizer - m.sommers@aupe.org
Trevor Zimmerman, Organizer - t.zimmerman@aupe.org
Mimi Williams, Communications - m.williams@aupe.org