Privatized Food in Healthcare: Bad for Workers, Patients, and Seniors

Want to fight back? Send an email to Kate Jacobson and Farid Iskandar, your AUPE organizers, to join the fight.

Premier Jason Kenney, Health Minister Tyler Shandro, and the rest of the UCP continue to push their job-killing privatization scheme for Alberta Health Services, and they’re aiming at AUPE members in AHS General Support Services next.

The UCP and their corporate buddies are eyeing food services as a target for outsourcing. They see food services in health care facilities as a way to make a profit, instead of an essential service for quality public health care.

Your AHS GSS negotiating team investigated what happens when governments privatize food services, and the results are downright frightening. We see dramatically worse working conditions, poor quality food for patients, and accusations of elder abuse hurled against these scandal-plagued private companies.

Here are some of the things we’ve found.

Effects on Workers

We can expect that, once the UCP implements its privatization plan, the first effect will be job cuts. Our employer will lay us off, and we will have to reapply to a private food services provider in the hopes of getting “new” jobs. For those of us who are “lucky” enough to be rehired, we can expect dramatically lowered wages and benefits, and much more difficult work.

These new jobs will be much worse. After privatization of food services in British Colombia’s healthcare system in 2002 – 2003, it became “almost impossible” for a food services worker to make enough income to bring them over Canada’s poverty line, except in the rare cases where the employee worked full-time and had no dependents.

Employers damaged benefit plans so much that some workers chose not to sign up to the new one at all, viewing it as not worth the cost. Under the private contractors, workers were twice as likely to get sick or injured on the job compared to when the service was public. Employers slashed those workers’ wages by over 40 per cent in some cases.

We can expect the same if the UCP pushes through their plan. And the dangerous effects of privatization aren’t just for workers, but for patients as well. No one’s job is safe.

Bordering on Elder Abuse

Three multinational companies almost always run privatized food services in institutions like hospitals, schools, or prisons: Sodexo, Aramark, and Compass Group. Each of these companies has a long history of scandals related to the health and safety of the food they provide. One of these three companies is very likely to end up taking on the contract if AHS privatizes food services.

In 2016, seniors at a long-term care facility in Powell River, BC protested against food shortages at their care facility. Sodexo was in charge of their food services. The residents said that they faced regular food shortages, and that the meals provided “border on elder abuse.”

The private company regularly gave residents Boost, a meal replacement beverage, instead of actual food. They reported rarely having access to fresh fruit, with one resident saying “we see a third of a banana maybe once in three weeks.”

When the public monitoring body attempted to address the issue, they found it nearly impossible to do so—because Sodexo had negotiated a clause in the privatization contract which did not require them to disclose purchasing information, making real accountability impossible. We can expect whatever private provider to attempt to negotiate similar clauses in their contracts here in Alberta.

In British Colombia, private food providers cooked meals in a central facility, froze them, and shipped them to hospitals and care homes across the province, so the food had poor nutritional content and was such poor quality that it often ended up in the trash.

Centralizing food production also meant that the private company didn’t actually re-hire the same number of food service workers— it abolished many of the positions entirely. If AHS follow suit, food service jobs in rural Alberta will vanish.

Patients in facilities with privatized food eat less and lose weight compared to patients who live in facilities with in-house food services. Private company food is generally high in sugar, high in fat, and highly processed, but the poor quality and quantity mean patients lose weight anyway! This low-quality food isn’t an accident of privatization—it’s exactly this type of cost-cutting that allows companies to make a profit on the backs of patients.

Privatization has been a failure

Many of the jurisdictions that privatized food services are proving they know they failed because they’re bringing services back in-house.

Here in Alberta, a previous attempt by AHS to centralize food production and distribute frozen meals to dozens of seniors’ residences across the province was scrapped in 2012, following backlash by workers and residents, as well as the “Tough to Swallow” campaign by AUPE, which helped make the issue into a province-wide debate. The Health Minister at the time, Progressive Conservative Fred Horne, said that he would not serve the food to his own mother.

After La Providence Hospital in Magog, Quebec, privatized food services in 1995, food costs increased by over 30 per cent. Once Sodexo’s contract expired, the hospital decided to go back to in-house food services.

In the UK, many hospitals reversed course on their privatized food services contracts—which Margaret Thatcher imposed in the 1980s—in the beginning of the 21st century, after it became clear that the experiment had failed to provide adequate food to patients.

The government of New Brunswick planned to privatize food services in 2013, but they abandoned the plan in 2018 after a study into its effects found that the public sector was more effective at providing these services to patients.

That’s why we’re fighting back. AUPE members know that, in every jurisdiction where it’s been tried, privatized food services have failed at even their most basic mission—cost savings—and have dramatically reduced the quality of food for patients, and the quality of work for us.

But having this knowledge is not enough. We need to share this information with our co-workers, get organized, and prepare to fight back.

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 new year, we’ll be looking at 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