Victoria hospital staff could lose jobs: union

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This article was published 18/09/2017 (2952 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority needs to be clear about what the consolidation of mental-health services at Victoria General Hospital means for jobs, says the union representing support workers at the facility.

Last week, the WRHA announced 700 front-line support staff would see their jobs change in some fashion during Phase 1 of its overhaul to health-care delivery. New schedule rotations were posted for staff at St. Boniface Hospital, Grace Hospital and Victoria — and almost immediately prompted union outcry.

At Victoria, the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) sounded the alarm about work hours for its 150 or so affected staff.

“As part of the government’s health-care restructuring, as many as 40 health-care workers at the Victoria General Hospital will lose their jobs,” MGEU president Michelle Gawronsky said in a statement that seemed at odds with the WRHA’s assurances nobody was being laid off yet.

The spokeswoman for the MGEU said the he-said, she-said arguments are frustrating because the numbers don’t add up.

“We can comfortably say we’re going from 40 (full-time) positions to 31 (full-time) positions,” she said, noting staff combed carefully through the new schedules.

For the past week, the Free Press has been pressing the WRHA on what the current ratio of full- to part-time support staff is at the three Winnipeg facilities and how they plan to change that moving forward.

At first, the WRHA’s senior labour relations counsel Karlee Blatz said she could not provide that information, although over the week she did release a few details.

However, there have been no answers to MGEU concerns staff will be left without jobs for the length of time it takes the WRHA to complete the construction necessary to shift mental-health services at Seven Oaks General Hospital and Grace to Victoria.

“We’re still waiting,” Gawronsky told the Free Press. “They won’t show us the plan. If they’re open and transparent, where is it?”

While St. Boniface employees have a stipulation in their collective agreement requiring a fairly even balance of full- to part-time staff, there’s nothing similar in the MGEU agreement with Victoria staff.

Blatz said per the hospital’s “future state,” the plan is to keep the current full- to part-time ratio and that the most current analysis of positions at Victoria “indicates the future state has over 150 (full-time) positions.”

That’s not exactly comforting to staff, given 155 employees received deletion notices and only 115 new schedule rotations were posted, Gawronsky said.

“That tells us that 40 members of ours are going to be without work somewhere within the Victoria hospital,” she said.

“The WRHA is saying there’s going to be work and there’s going to be stuff opened up in a year from now when they open up the mental health, but I’m asking how many beds is the mental health going to be? They can’t tell me for sure.”

Blatz did not answer questions about what the impact on Victoria hospital staffing ratios would be before it reaches “the future state,” although she previously said the WRHA believes “there are opportunities for them.”

“As long as the employer schedules meet the rules in the relevant collective agreement for support workers, it can be implemented,” she said. “Other than creating these rules, schedules are not bargained collectively.”

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.ca