Contract talks for CUPE hospital workers break off

Contract talks between 3,500 CUPE hospital workers and eight district health authorities across the province have broken off. There are 800 CUPE employees within the South West Health district. “After what has been a long and extremely difficult bargaining process to date, the employers finally tabled a package which included a wage offer that can only be described as not coming close to meeting our expectations,” says CUPE’s Acute Care Coordinator Wayne Thomas.

Thomas says what is at issue is the very fundamental concept of wage parity with hospital workers in the Capital District Health Authority (CDHA). “This is something that CUPE hospital workers have spent the last 10 years achieving, and it is not something they are about to simply walk away from,” says Thomas. “In fact, most of what we have left on the table involves us trying to maintain and replicate rights that are enjoyed by other groups in the sector.”

CUPE says the package put before the union would leave workers outside the Capital District Health Authority with wage rates that are between two per cent and eight percent behind their counterparts in Halifax.

CUPE will be holding the first of 18 strike votes on Thursday, Nov. 5 in Sydney. The union’s collective agreements for its service, clerical and health-care groups expired on March 31.

Examples of workers involved in these contract negotiations are: food and nutrition services, maintenance, housekeeping, laundry, licensed practical nurses, personal care workers, laboratory technologists, dieticians, radiological technologists, respiratory therapists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers, MRI techs and others.