Health Sciences Association rejects SAHO contract offer

REGINA – Members of the Health Sciences Association of Saskatchewan have rejected a contract offer from the Saskatchewan Association of Health Organizations and the provincial government – and instead given their negotiators an 88-per-cent strike mandate.

"Our members have spoken with a clear and forceful voice – they find the SAHO contract offer totally unacceptable," HSAS president Cathy Dickson said in a news release issued Tuesday.

When negotiations resume Wednesday, "SAHO will need to move off this proposal and be prepared to bargain in good faith going forward."

SAHO president Susan Antosh was unavailable Tuesday, but said earlier this month the employers’ goal is to offer market-competitive wages when compared to other Western provinces.

"We believe that to be a very fair and reasonable position of the employer," she said. "We don’t understand why someone would be insulted at a wage-competitive offer."

Antosh added that an initial offer is a starting point – and not where SAHO expects to end up when bargaining ends.

Addressing this week’s talks, Dickson said her union’s response will depend on what SAHO does. "The one thing I’ve learned is that you never guess what SAHO will do because you’re wrong every time."

In the HSAS release, Dickson added that "recruitment and retention has become increasingly difficult with the average wage rate of our members being 25-per-cent less than their counterparts in neighbouring Alberta."

She sees a "double standard" is at work, with SAHO and the provincial government recently giving health-care managers wage increases of up to 37 per cent plus new benefits. "Then they turned around and offered our members – the professionals who actually serve patients – a wage increase below the cost of living, no improvements to workplace benefits, a series of contract take-aways, and even a threat to eliminate retroactive pay unless our members accepted the offer before March 31st."

HSAS represents about 3,000 specialized health workers in over 30 specialties including paramedics, acute-care workers like hospital pharmacists, perfusionists and respiratory therapists; rehabilitation professionals like physical therapists and speech language pathologists, and community-based professionals like public health inspectors, psychologists and social workers.

This dispute takes place against the backdrop of the Saskatchewan Party’s controversial essential services legislation. Under it, SAHO last week indicated it considered fully 50 per cent of HSAS members to be essential in case of a strike.

Dickson said she isn’t sure what proportion of HSAS members in the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region had been deemed essential because the language in the legislation is "extremely convoluted", though she allowed it’s possible all emergency medical services personnel fall into that category.

HSAS has posted SAHO’s most recent offer on its website. This indicates the offer consists of a 5.5-per-cent wage increase over four years: 1.5 per cent, one per cent, 1.5 per cent and 1.5 per cent from April 2009 to April 2012.

In HSAS’s members’ responses to this offer, "the message is, over and over, ‘What’s wrong with SAHO? Why do they think so little of us?’, said Dickson, adding that members feel "very discouraged, but also angry."