B.C.’s nurses have issued a 72-hour strike notice, saying the action shows their growing frustration with pressures facing the profession and health-care system.
This comes after the rejection of a tentative agreement reached between the Nurses’ Bargaining Association (NBA) and health employers.
Sixty-seven per cent of nurses rejected the agreement after 98.2 per cent voted in May in favour of job action.
The agreement did have improvements to benefits and shift premiums, but nurses want to secure a general wage increase to reflect the fact that they play a vital role in sustaining a health-care system that is operating beyond its limits, according to information released by the union.
“This is fundamentally a conversation about priorities,” says BCNU president Adriane Gear in a release. “Nurses want to know why the health authorities continue to spend millions of dollars on costly short-term staffing solutions, while the nurses who are here for the long-term struggling with workload pressures, unsafe working conditions and staffing shortages are being told the cupboards are empty.”
The union says that a strike is not a step that nurses want to take.
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“However, many have reached the point where they feel they have no choice but to shine a light on the realities they face every day while caring for British Columbians in crowded hospitals, understaffed long-term care facilities, community health settings andpatients’s homes across the province,” NBA chief negotiator and BCNU CEO Jim Gould said.
What does job action look like?
The union will be in a legal strike position as of Thursday at 12:01 p.m. unless a deal is reached.
Job action could include abandoning non-nursing duties and restricting overtime, but as an essential service, a minimum level of staffing must be maintained.
The union said more information on their next steps will be shared as it becomes available.
Wild that global news is glossing over the fact that benefits would be cut off employer funding by 2030. Who says yes to that?
Please be aware the tentative agreement was not improved benefits. It was a reallocation of money, attempting to put nurses in a Benefit trust which did not secure benefits for the future, nurse patient ratio still have not been met in the province an a clause that would prevent any action by the Union in the future from seeking consequences for ratio not being met.
GWI of 12% is the “me too” clause we could not bargain for any higher wages.
We need the public’s support as we are trying to fight for the public for better healthcare
VCC had 600 nursing students last year. This year, they cancelled their nursing program due to lack of funding. The province must fund the nurses. Anyone who’s been in an ER knows that. I was hospitalised from April 1 – May 7. I was in ER, ICU, the High Acuity Ward, and the Medical ward on 14G of VGH’s Jim Pattison Pavilion. I witnessed lack of nurses. They are a special breed, compassionate, yet doing scary and yucky things. They deserve the pay, and they need help with more nurses. There are certainly not enough of them to go around on 14G. I witnessed a doctor whose father, also a doctor, who was in the bed next to me, sneak her father out of the hospital and take him home to her house for his safety and well-being because the nurses just did not have the staff to help him as much as he needed.
My wife works in health care at St Paul’s . Not a nurse, but someone who assists. If the general public only knew what was going on in the hospitals, in line with gov’t policies and human rights issues there would be an outrage. Despite the hospital employing ‘security’ there are many assaults on nurses and staff that lead to Long Term Disabilty cases. Yet the street people who use the hospital as a ‘hotel’ coming and going when they please are rarely held accountable.
The system is broken but who will fix it?
This from a union that has set it up that senior nurses can opt to work only shifts that pay overtime only
If anyone dies in hospital during the strike and it is attributed to lack of nursing care, the relatives should sue the union for the same total amount that the nurses are asking in a raise as a group. Or better still, get a lawsuit going to stop the strike and go for binding arbitration.
All of this from a union who are staunch NDP supporters. By doing so they have for the past 12 years agreed with and publicly supported their Healthcare policies, seems odd that suddenly they have problems? Sounds like a case of living with what you asked for, no?
The government will end up getting rid of the nurses, and forcing MAID on everyone instead of offering care. It would save them a bunch of money to put in their own pockets. The corruption is now happening in broad daylight.