long-term care union's first ratification vote successful, signalling final step in ending nova scotia strike
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long-term care workers and supporters rally outside province house on april 27.
ryan taplin
/
chronicle herald
the long-term care workers’ strike in nova scotia is in the final phases of coming to an end.
canadian union of public employees (cupe) members at st. vincent’s nursing home in halifax ratified a new collective agreement thursday after the provincial government and the local’s bargaining team struck a tentative deal saturday.
a cupe news release said the local “acts as the lead table for cupe’s long-term care sector bargaining, and they are responsible for negotiating terms that impact other bargaining tables, including setting the economic pattern for the entire sector.”
in other words, a majority of the locals at the 36 other affected facilities across the province are expected to follow suit in the coming days and weeks to ratify their own collective agreements through individual votes. there are a handful of locals that have outstanding issues that are unique to their bargaining, so those negotiations will continue until all loose ends are tied up.
“i’m incredibly proud of the work the lead table bargaining team did,” christa sweeney, chair for the long-term and community care committee, said in the release. “it was a long, tiring process and it wouldn’t have been possible without the tremendous support and solidarity shown by long-term care workers province-wide.”
the work stoppage started april 13 and grew to include more than 3,500 workers from around the province. non-essential employees walked picket lines for roughly eight weeks, while essential workers, like licensed practical nurses and continuing care assistants, remained on the job to maintain basic care for nursing home residents.
the main area of disagreement was wages, with the union saying many members could not cover basic living expenses on what they were being paid and the government standing firm that pay scales were at an acceptable level.
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in the end, cupe said in its release that the bargaining team was “successful in fighting for a minimum (five-dollar per hour) raise for all workers over the life of the collective agreement, additional wages for supervising and training students, and improved layoff protections.”
to make the numbers work, the sides agreed to lengthen the term of the contract to six years. for most of the bargaining period, the parties were working around a four-year framework.
the deal will now expire in 2029 and the bulk of the pay increases will be implemented during the first five years of the agreement, which is backdated to 2023 when the previous agreement expired.
kim cail, cupe long-term care co-ordinator, did her best to explain the complicated structure of the monetary pieces of the deal.
“the $5 increase actually goes from november 1 of 2023 to november 1 of 2027,” she said.
“so on november 1 of 2027, there are the economic increases and market adjustments, and then when all of that is added up, if every classification has not received a $5 increase within that five-year period, there will be a another adjustment to bring them up to $5 so it would be a different monetary amount for every classification.”
employees will also receive retroactive pay to cover that roughly three-year gap from when the previous deal expired. workers will be compensated with a lump sum to make up the difference from what they earned during that period and what they would have been paid under the terms of the new contract.
“it’s an extremely difficult settlement to try to track because (pay) increases are pretty straightforward, but there are so many market adjustments and other kinds of adjustments that it can be hard for everyone to follow,” cail said.
picketing stopped as soon as the sides reached a tentative agreement on the weekend but staffing will remain at essential levels at locals that are still working their way through the ratification process.
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“we are tasked with doing 36 different (return-to-work protocols),” cail said.
“a lot of the locals are already done but others are still bargaining . . . so once those are resolved, the changes made locally to their collective agreement will be attached to the lead table settlement for each one of the locals to have their own ratification votes. then once the return-to-work protocol is signed, they can go back in and work their regular schedule.”
barbara adams, nova scotia’s minister of seniors and long-term care, could not be reached for comment.
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