REGINA - Health care workers were at the Legislature on Wednesday demanding fair wages to keep up with affordability and cost of living pressures.
Busloads of CUPE 5430 health care workers from around the province were outside the Saskatchewan Legislature during the noon hour, waving placards and chanting about the economic struggles they are facing.
CUPE 5430 leaders were demanding what they call a "fair deal" from the government, with workers calling for better efforts at retention to keep workers from leaving for neighbouring provinces.
“Our health care system is in significant free fall,” said Bashir Jalloh, president of CUPE 5430.
“We have staff shortages leading to burnout and we educate people in this province, we train them in the hospital, all our hospitals are teaching hospitals. They finish, after they get their experiences, they leave, they go to Alberta and British Columbia. Now they are moving to Manitoba. Why? Because of the low wages and also because of the precarious work environment. Most of the jobs that are posted in this province when you finish for a new grad are part-time and that can occur for somebody who is just finishing school, has a significant amount of student loan debt.”
The rally comes while CUPE continues its efforts to get a new collective bargaining agreement, but there is still no sign of a deal happening.
“For two years we have been bargaining. And the rate of which that bargaining is going is extremely slow,” Jalloh said.
We have talked to our bargaining agent, we have talked to the employers, we have talked to the government to talk to them to come to the bargaining table prepared. What we do, we prepare, we give them an agenda. But they come to the bargaining table not prepared. They are using the three days that we are there, that's what the time they are using to prepare for bargaining. So we end up meeting for about less than an hour or two for the three days that we are meeting. So it is not going very well and there is no way we are going to achieve this if we don't have enough face-to-face time.”
MLAs from the opposition New Democrats also were on hand at the rally. Jared Clarke, MLA for Regina Walsh Acres, spoke to the rally and he blasted the Sask Party government, saying they “should be embarrassed about the state of health care in this province.”
“These are workers who have worked hard, they have put in a lot of sweat, love and passion and I think they deserve to get a fair deal,” Clarke told reporters. “We're facing a health care crisis in terms of retaining health care workers. One way this government could show how they respect workers and want to retain workers is getting a deal signed for health care workers.”
