"BC Government ordering union back to work"

[Guest physiology]

This is a late reply but I don't really agree with all this union bashing.

 

The Canadian Medical Association, the BC Medical Association...they're all unions. Just because they don't have the words "local 12341431" attached to them doesn't mean they're not a union.

 

I mean if you look at the word "union", it means to unite and join together, and that's exactly what health care workers from various professions have done.

 

I wonder how Moo and Ian's opinions would change if the BC physicians launched their own job action. I do not mean to slight anyone and I am not writing this in an angry or defiant manner. I just wish to express my view.

 

I recall years ago BC physicians said that it wasn't about money and that it was patient's first, despite myriad cancelled surgeries. Sounds frighteningly familiar doesn't it? It seems as if health care strikes, be it by the HEU, nurses, or BCMA, seem to possess similar, militant tactics.

 

Don't forget, unions are the reason today why we have rights as workers including benefits such as maternity leave, vacation, holidays, etc. Unions are the way that workers stand up against bullish, autocratic governments and if they exercise their democratic right to protest, then so be it. Without a union, 43 000 health care workers would have been contracted out and effectively lost their jobs to individuals working at private companies earning $10/hour.

 

Perhaps I hold this opinion because I am not a on surgical waitlist, nor is anyone in my family.

 

Now who's to blame for the HEU members' inflated wages? It's not fair to blame the HEU workers themselves. If you dangle that carrot of higher wages, who's not going to bite?

 

Again, I think personal biases enter into the equation. Someone has an Aunt Nora who works at Walmart as a cashier, and she's struggling to make ends meet at $11/hour while HEU cashiers are earning $18/hour. Or you've witnessed something egregious on behalf of a union. Mostly likely, this was an isolated incident and not representative of all unions or offices in the province.

 

And granted, I do have my own biases as well. I just think it's easy to get caught up with all the emotion, especially on an internet forum where sarcasm, tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language cannot be ascertained.

[Guest strider2004]

Actually, the CMA, OMA, BC MA are more lobby/interest groups than they are unions. The CMA focuses on patient education and getting information across to the public more than negotiating between the government and physicians.

You will often see announcements on behalf of the CMA for things like public health and health care, not to protect the physicians in its membership, but to protect the public at large. This is the difference between an interest group and a union.

 

However, groups like PAIRO, CFMS, PAR-BC, CAIR are unions because they are involved with discussing resident salaries. I also don't agree with their practices because they don't always practice good medicine. They have done many good things (it's nice to have a limit of 28h/shift) but it shouldn't be a steadfast rule. If there's work to be done, I don't think a resident should be hiding behind a PAIRO rule that they should stay past 12pm post-call. Many surgical rotations don't even allow post-call and hey, that's the norm. Is it that bad? No! There's work to be done. I've been post-call and have stayed until 6:30pm, and this was AFTER I had already matched to internal medicine and marks didn't count. I wasn't trying to look good or suck up to the resident, but when there's work to be done, then...well...you should be working! I don't think anybody should be forced to leave at 12pm (though if a PAIRO rep catches you, they'll lecture you on why you SHOULD be leaving at 12).

 

I don't know if you can say that unions are the cause of people having so many nice benfit packages. There are plenty of private companies which offer the same packages to their employees. It's called COMPETITION. If an employer wants the best workers, then they have to be competitive in their contracts.

 

I remember about 40 years ago in Saskatchewan physicians held a strike to protest medicare in that province. Somebody died, the physicians looked bad, and eventually they succumbed to public pressure and accepted medicare. I bet the same thing will happen in BC to the HEU.

[Guest moo]

I wonder how Moo and Ian's opinions would change if the BC physicians launched their own job action.

 

I said above that I would never support physician job action. I didn't agree with the office closures by MDs a few years ago and I still don't agree with it today. The difference between the BCMA and a union though, is that MDs are not forced to listen to the BCMA. If they choose to remain open while 80% of other doctors decide to "strike" then they can.

[Guest Ian Wong]

I guess I'm still at that idealistic stage where I feel that you should be rewarded on merit and hard work. To follow your previous example, if Aunt Nora makes makes $11 as a cashier, and Aunt Betty makes $18 as an HEU cashier, and they are both equivalently trained and doing equivalent work, I think that's fundamentally injust, and more importantly, economically stupid.

 

I think that free competition is a far better determinant of the value of your wage. It works for the other 90% of the workforce, all the non-unionized people out there. What makes the 10% of unionized people so special that they deserve this extra money? Especially when the majority of that money is coming from the taxes of all the non-unionized workers? How is that at all fair?

 

More importantly, if the hospital discovers that there are other Aunt Nora's out there willing to work for $11 an hour, I believe that the hospital should have every right to let Aunt Betty go once her contract is up for renewal, and compete with all the other hospitals to hire the available Aunt Nora's.

 

In my mind, this holds for other hospital positions as well. If you can find a GI doc willing to work for $90,000 a year, then HIRE HIM/HER! I do happen to think that the pay scales for physicians are out of whack. There's no reason that an ophthalmologist should be able to rack up $400 per ten minute cataract when the family docs of this country are struggling to crack $30 per 15 minute appointment. There's no reason that a dermatologist who freezes warts for a living should be making more money than the cardiac surgeon or neurosurgeon busting himself to save lives on a daily basis. There's no reason that a family doc who sees tough patients on a daily basis should be making 50-75% of the income of a family doc who does nothing but rapidfire walk-in clinics. Once again, to me, none of these make sense.

 

As far as physicians withholding services, I have a real tough time with it. I think if I felt that the negotiations were likely to benefit the public at large (ie. it would bring in new doctors, or open up more operating rooms, or buy a new MRI scanner), I would be more amenable to it. If it was for a simple wage hike, I wouldn't. In either event, if I disagreed with the motives for the strike, I'd be happy to cross the picket line to see my inpatients who need daily rounding or attention. In fact, I doubt any physician would prevent you from crossing the picket line. We all know what it means to be invested in your patient.

 

I think that we have to hold ourselves to our patients (that's why they invented pagers and the on call shift), and like Strider, I too have stayed up to 6-7 pm post-call, simply because I didn't feel I could leave one of my patients in good conscience at the time. That was 36 consecutive hours I spent in the hospital, and not a single breath of fresh air, nor a glimpse outside, or hardly a wink of sleep in that time. Could I have punched out "early"? Yes. Did I? Absolutely not. That's an individual decision that we each have to make, when our professional obligations conflict with our personal values.

 

Ian

[Guest moo]

There's thousands of other stories like this as a result of last week's events:

 

Vancouver Symphony Orchestra violinist Anne Cramer doesn't have much sympathy for health care workers who face a 15-per-cent pay and benefit cut as a result of the deal between the government and the Hospital Employees' Union.

 

Her sympathy is lacking because she took the same kind of pay cut, and her intestinal surgery was postponed because of the strike.

 

"Patients have been made the victims throughout all of this. As a surgery patient, you are scared about the operation, then you get yourself psyched up for it, only to learn it's cancelled," she said Monday.

 

Although her condition is painful, it is not life-threatening, and she does have a new date in the operating room three weeks from now. But Cramer said cancellation of her April 30 surgery was a major inconvenience as she spent two days of uncomfortable colon cleansing in preparation for the surgery and her mother, who was to fly here from Oregon for the surgery, had to pay an airline ticket cancellation fee.

 

The good news is that the VSO allowed Cramer to come back to work even though she had booked two weeks off, thinking she would need it for her post-surgery recovery.

 

For all those reasons, Cramer was intrigued when she heard that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is looking into a class action lawsuit against the Hospital Employees' Union. Cramer is one of about 45 people who have contacted the federation, after it began soliciting stories from people whose hospital procedures were cancelled by the strike.

 

"The union needs to be held accountable and recognize the impact of their actions on patients," said CTF director Sara MacIntyre.

 

Cramer says she and fellow musicians have taken pay cuts for two years and their paid vacation time shrunk to one week from four when it became obvious the symphony's financial picture was dire.

 

Although musicians are also in a union, "we realized the money was not there and so we just used our logic to realize we had to do this because if we didn't, the symphony wouldn't survive."

 

Cramer, who has been with the symphony since 1978 and earns $33,425 a year, said she thinks HEU workers are "ridiculous for thinking that there's a pot of gold and job security to which they are entitled."

 

She joins 7,000 other B.C. patients whose operations were delayed by the strike and must again prepare mentally and physically for their operations. Clay Adams, spokesman for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, said full surgery at hospitals in the region won't resume until Wednesday. On top of 1,272 operations needing to be re-scheduled are 3,800 diagnostic exams.

 

"Our big concern right now is ensuring that people calm their nerves because things have been very tense around here. While we're not under any misconceptions that we're going to wake up tomorrow and have everything back to normal, I don't think patients have to be worried or concerned at all that their care will suffer because workers are hostile or resentful that they were ordered back to work," he said

[Guest lothya]

An acquaintance of mine did an interesting art project a couple of years back... He interviewed "people on the street" about their opinions on current political events and policy changes, and broadcast their responses on community radio. They had interesting things to say. He also asked them to comment on things like current events in molecular genetics... and they often stated that since they weren't geneticists, they couldn't really comment.

 

Interestingly, neither were they political scientists, or labour relations experts...

 

Not that your average med student has time to read all they're supposed to read about medicine, let alone dense social theory ...

 

:hat

[Guest physiology]

Cramer, who has been with the symphony since 1978 and earns $33,425 a year, said she thinks HEU workers are "ridiculous for thinking that there's a pot of gold and job security to which they are entitled."

 

What Ms. Cramer isn't telling you is that, that's not the ONLY money she earns. Teaching music or providing lessons, which almost ALL VSO members do, either at the UBC School of Music or privately, also adds substantially to their income.

 

My point is, that health care workers don't have this option.

 

I've read elsewhere that perhaps the government should also take a 15% paycut, in sympathy of the plight of the healthcare workers' union. I agree.

[Guest tea]

well the strike is over and i shouldn't be talking about this anymore. However, i'd like to express my point anyway. I agreed with Ian and Moo, based on personal experiences.

1. I was a med tech. I didn't have an option of not joining a union. If i wanted the job, i'd have to be in union. It bothers me to hear union members on radio/tv complaining how hard they work. I do know how i was "encouraged" to work by other with higher seniority. "Take 30 minutes for breaks. We do it all the time. Lunch 1hour." Well, let's do the math here. I worked 7.5 hours/day, minus 2 hours (lunch and break)..well my day was only 5.5hours of actual work.

2. Actual work: majority of the time: sitting around and reading newspaper or gossiping. I attempted to clean up the room and was told that i was doing the job of another union member. oh well...

3. I've also heard complaints from union members about the salary of managements and other people. I'm sorry but, the job responsibilities are not the same. More responsibilities = higher pay. I don't hear people at Walmart or Royalbank complained about how high their CEOs are making.

 

I believe that unions should exist in private corporation such as Nike. However, public sectors with monopoly services should not be unionized. It seemed unlikely that the employers would be practicing sweatshop labour practices. It only fostered a work enviroment where workers are not motivated to work. (i was prevented from giving my employer my best. Who cares, when rewards are based only on seniority? )

 

tea

[Guest marbledust]

Are you suggesting tea that private sector employees should be entitled to the protection and resources of unions (wages, safety, etc) but public sector employees shouldn't by virtue of them holding a "monopoly position"?

 

I've got to stop reading this thread or my head is going to explode.

 

I am going to turn this around. I have in the past been a unionized employee in a hospital. I did witness questionable behaviour by some employees, a very few compared to the number of hard working, honest employees I worked with or encountered on a daily basis. I also saw cases where employees were verbally abused, forced to work in unsafe conditions, and taken advantage of. Who saw that things were fixed? The unions.

 

It's nice to see union workers being painted with a brush that makes them out to be collectively dishonest, lazy, unmotivated and only out to rip off the system.

 

I've seen the exact same thing in the private sector.

[Guest moo]

I think what we've been saying all along is what makes public sector employees more deserving of certain benefits (pay, vacation, sick days, etc.) versus private sector employees that do the same type of work. True, unions do provide certain protection to employees, and in some ways are needed, but when they get too powerful, as they have under the ten years of NDP rule in BC, you get strikes that can grind the whole province to a halt, jeopardizing patients' lives.

[Guest marbledust]

There it goes...my head has now officially exploded :lol

[Guest physiology]

Gordon Campbell patted me on the back this year. I can still remember his smiling, reddish face (hmm..wonder why) and those squinty eyes.

 

I felt like yelling at him "LOWER MY TUITION GOD DAMN IT"

 

But alas, too many police men around.