Privatizating Environmental Services is a disaster waiting to happen
As Alberta Health Services continues to move toward implementing the UCP plan to privatize essential healthcare services, we at AHS GSS are in the line of fire. Their plan, we all know, is a disaster waiting to happen.
A key component of the UCP plan is to privatize in-house environmental services. Jason Kenney, Tyler Shandro, and Travis Toews all say that their plan will save Alberta money. They say privatization is necessary because of the economic downturn. We know they’re lying to us—their crusade is ideological, and they would be making the same moves even if the economy were doing well.
When we look at other jurisdictions that have privatized environmental services, we see results that are downright frightening: slashed wages, intensified work rhythm, and increases in illnesses for patients.
This bargaining update will look over some of the many ways that AHS plans will hurt us, our co-workers, and the patients who depend on our hard work to make Alberta’s public health care system function.
How privatization will impact us
Environmental Services workers are one component of UCP’s plan to fire a huge section of the workforce at AHS—a plan which would lay off 11,000 workers in total.
We have seen things like this happen in Alberta before. In 2014, Shepherd’s Care long-term care centre in south Edmonton suddenly laid off nearly 160 cleaning staff and meal preparation workers, and hired a private contractor to replace them. Workers later won a settlement because those layoffs were declared illegal by the Alberta Labour Relations Board. In our case, AHS won’t make the same technical mistake that caused the last payout—so we need to fight for our jobs.
In 2003, British Colombia saw a massive wave of layoffs in the healthcare sector, mostly targeting support staff. At the time, it was the biggest privatization of its kind in Canadian history. Outsourcing and privatization hit 8,500 workers. Like the UCP, the government of BC justified their layoffs using budget concerns. Today, the UCP is planning on jumping ahead of that record and firing 11,000 AHS GSS workers.
The plan in BC was a disaster for workers. Cleaners in 2002 made an average of $18.32 per hour in 2002—equal to $25.63 in today’s dollars, after inflation. Within the first two years of privatization, affected staff—those who were lucky enough to get re-hired—had wages fall by over 40 per cent. By 2020, privatized cleaning staff still only make an average of $17 per hour, while the workers who escaped privatization make $20 per hour.
Contractors also hired fewer workers overall, leading to a constant crisis of understaffing. Workers reported being alone on their shifts and feared that there would be no one around if they were injured on the job. Others said that even a single worker calling in sick would lead to short staffing, as the contractors didn’t hire enough workers to replace staff who were sick.
We’ve even seen cases where understaffing in privatized environmental services leads to nurses taking on the work of cleaning staff. The UCP can say that we aren’t frontline workers all they want, but we know that our work allows nursing care providers to do their jobs properly.
Patients are more likely to get sick
Once environmental services work is contracted out, quality of care drops. One metric, in particular, is important for patients—the fact that they are more likely to get sick with a privatized cleaning staff compared to in-house environmental services.
Studies of privatization show that contracting out cleaning services leads to an increase in health care-associated infections (HAIs), illnesses that patients catch while they’re in a healthcare institutions. These infections became significantly more common after environmental services were privatized in Ontario, Quebec, BC, and the UK.
Healthcare-associated infections already claim the lives of between 8,500 and 12,000 Canadians per year. The UCP doesn’t care that their plan would increase those numbers significantly.
Independent health care researcher Colleen Fuller writes that these “infections are linked to understaffing, increased workload, high turnover and poor training of staff. The way that these [privatized] companies earn the big bucks is by… reducing staff, increasing the workload, foregoing training of the workforce and maintaining poor wages and working conditions that lead to low morale and high staff turnovers.”
We fight back
The UCP might think that they can bulldoze us at the legislature, but they’re about to learn how wrong they are. In every worksite where AUPE members work, we’re getting organized and ready to fight for ourselves, and for the Albertans who depend on the services we provide.
Just like laundry workers made Klein blink in ’95, we’re going to make Kenney back down today. Because that’s what we do, as AUPE members. We fight and we win.
Send an email to Kate Jacobson and Farid Iskandar, your AUPE organizers, to join the fight. And reach out to your Local’s negotiating representatives to see how you can get involved and spread the word of these incoming cuts at your workplace.
We’re going to continue researching the effects of privatization on workers and patients. In the next weeks, we’ll be looking at food services, supply chain procurement, protective services, and IT staff.
AHS GSS Negotiating Team
Local 054 Julie Woodford - juliew.chp006@gmail.com Charity Hill (A) - charity.johanson@gmail.com
Local 056 Deborah Nawroski – dlnawroski@gmail.com Tammy Lanktree (A) – tamlanktree@gmail.com
Local 057 Darren Graham - chairlocal057@aupe.ca Wendy Kicia (A) - wendykicia@hotmail.com
Local 058 Anton Schindler - waterdude69@gmail.com Dave Ibach (A) - dI322j@gmail.com
Local 095 Stacey Ross - sross13@shaw.ca Dusan Milutinovic (A) - dusan.aupe@yahoo.com
Lamont Health Care Centre GSS Jessica Kroeker - jessicarayne@hotmail.com Carol Palichuk - carolpalichuk@hotmail.com
AUPE Resource Staff for AHS GSS
Chris Dickson, Lead Negotiator - c.dickson@aupe.org
Jason Rattray, Negotiator - j.rattray@aupe.org
Farid Iskandar, Organizer - f.iskandar@aupe.org
Kate Jacobson, Organizer - k.jacobson@aupe.org
Alexander Delorme, Communications - a.delorme@aupe.org