Heather Smith responds to misleading Calgary Herald editorial

The Calgary Herald’s Nov. 5 editorial “Taxpayers are being gouged” both misunderstands and misrepresents the collective agreement between the United Nurses of Alberta and Alberta Health Services to reach an unsupportable conclusion that nurses’ overtime pay is hurting the health care system.

The unnamed editorial writer’s suggestion overtime is a significant cost driver in the health care system is simply wrong. AHS has conceded in past negotiations with UNA that overtime is not a significant factor in the cost of the Alberta health care workforce. In fact, the amount of overtime in the health care sector is around 5 per cent, compared to higher rates in the rest of the economy. In addition, nurses work significant amounts of overtime for which they are entitled to be paid but do not claim.

So if the Calgary Herald has corroborating evidence for its conclusion about the cost of overtime to the health care system, I am sure both UNA and AHS would be interested to learn what it is.

The editorial also confuses the difference between casual and part-time nurses, citing the contract’s provisions relating to casual employees to draw misleading conclusions about part-time nurses.

Nurses designated as “casual” (not part-time) are entitled to overtime if they work more than 147.25 hours over a four-week period. But it is simply not factually correct to state, as the Herald does, that a casual nurse is therefore eligible to be paid overtime if she works more than 36.8 hours. To qualify for overtime the nurse would have had to have worked more than the entire 147.25 hours over four weeks. So it is possible for a nurse to have worked more than 80 hours in one week and get no overtime!

Moreover, the Herald editorial gets it wrong when it states that paramedics do not have similar provisions in their collective agreement, and the Herald’s comparison of health care professionals like paramedics and Registered Nurses to taxi drivers and truck drivers is troubling and illogical to say the least.

Finally, it is really outrageous for the Herald to try to turn these poorly supported arguments into a wholesale attack on the public health care system.

However, the Herald editorial is right when it states that 28 per cent of the RNs employed by AHS work full time, compared with a national rate of 56 per cent.

But the editorial omits to mention how this came about – a process that began with badly conceived policies implemented by the Alberta government during the mid-1990s and continued over several years through consistent management decisions at AHS and its predecessor organizations to emphasize the hiring of a “just-in-time” workforce based on part-time and casual employees.

Other factors include a difficult workplace environment that results in dissatisfaction among RNs who are not willing to work full time, and an aging workforce no longer able to “leap tall buildings in a single bound.” In a profession that is predominantly composed of women, many nurses choose to work part time or casual shifts in order to raise their families or care for elderly relatives.

There is a worldwide shortage of RNs and a worldwide market for their services, and it is easy to see how the Herald’s conclusion that overtime earned by nurses is keeping the system from hiring more nurses is false.

I would be curious to know what prompted this editorial at this time, as UNA and AHS are about to start their 2013 round of bargaining. I would hope it is not driven by a desire to erode the right of nurses to designated days of rest (whether their “weekend” falls on an actual weekend or during the week) without proper compensation like that received by police officers, paramedics or truck drivers.

UNA supports the implementation of a higher percentage of full-time positions over time. But such a policy shift has to recognize that RNs employed by AHS have built their lives around this employer’s previous longstanding policies and they cannot be expected to rearrange their lives to suit a sudden and arbitrary change by AHS managers and board members.

UNA is prepared to work with AHS to achieve these goals, but this cannot be achieved by launching a wholesale attack on our members’ working conditions. For its part, AHS needs to address the reasons many employees are not now able or willing to work full time – family commitments, personal life demands, age and stressful working conditions at AHS worksites among them.

 

Heather Smith
President, United Nurses of Alberta