IWA Health Care Deals Betray Women Workers

By June, 6,000 health care service workers will have lost their jobs as government health care authorities contract out the work the workers once provided. So it should come as no surprise that the provincial government also legislated striking Hospital Employees Union members back to work on Wednesday, following a three-day strike. The Liberals also cut their wages by 11 percent and increased hours of work in an imposed two-year contract.

The B.C. government's previous legislation promoting health care privatization was also deeply troubling. It is destroying the pay equity gains that women doing support work in the health care sector have made during the past 30 years. The effect on wages and conditions of work has been stunning: wages in the areas that have been privatized have been cut almost in half and most benefits have been eliminated or drastically reduced.

That the Liberal government has done this is unsurprising. That a union should aid them is a grave disappointment.

The whole process of wage reduction has been facilitated by the unscrupulous activities of a male-oriented union, the Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada (IWA), which has taken advantage of the attempts by government to undermine the role of the Hospital Employees Union. Eighty-five percent of HEU's 40,000-odd members are women. It is also a union that represents a larger proportion of immigrant women, visible minority women, and older women than is present in B.C.'s working population

Pay-equity gains reversed

In the absence of the pay equity legislation that exists in most other Canadian provinces and territories, pay equity in B.C. has been achieved primarily through the efforts of unions and the requirement, through the NDP government of the 1990s, that the public sector raise wages of low-income workers.

These pay equity gains, however, are being reversed through privatization. In 2002, the Liberal government passed Bill 29, which unilaterally altered collective agreements between health care employers and unions and removed job-security and contracting-out provisions. Bill 94, passed in 2003, prohibited collective agreements with private health-care contractors from limiting the ability to contract out.

The goals of the legislation were very explicit: to provide business opportunities for private corporations and reduce compensation for health-care support workers. Thousands of health care support workers have since been laid off as health authorities privatized housekeeping, security, laundry, and food services work. Most of them are women, many are from immigrant and visible minority backgrounds.

International corporations benefit

The largest out-sourcing contracts, for housekeeping and food services, are with the three largest multinational service corporations in the world - Compass, Sedexho, and Aramark, based in the U.S., Britain and France.

Multinational companies bidding for health support service contracts are not required to hire HEU workers or recognize the union's successorship rights.

To further limit the HEU's ability to organize these workers, the multinationals took the unprecedented step of approaching other trade unions with "voluntary recognition agreements." These allow the terms and conditions of employment to be established my mutual agreement between the union and company prior to hiring the workforce.

The overwhelming majority of the B.C. Federation of Labour affiliates recognized the HEU's right to organize this work, and refused to co-operate with the outside contractors. There was, however, one notable exception, Local 1-3567 of the Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada (IWA), which signed "voluntary recognition agreements" with Sedexho, Compass and Aramark.

IWA ignorant of women's issues

 

Historically, the IWA has been primarily a male, forest-industry union with no experience in the hospital sector. The IWA's experience with women's issues, as one might expect, has been very limited.

The severe wage reductions contained in the Aramark /IWA contract are clearly unorthodox, if not exploitative, particularly for workers in a province with such a high cost of living. A housekeeper's wages will start at $10.25 an hour with no guarantee of full-time work. Thirty hours of work a week would deliver annual earnings of $15,980; 40 hours would deliver $21,315.00. Wages for housekeepers (cleaners) have decreased by 44 per cent from the HEU contract levels. This is 26 percent less than the national average for this same work.

Under these new rates, B.C. will have the lowest pay in the country for every job category in hospital support work--and by substantial amounts, between 14 and 39 percent. Even relatively low-wage provinces like Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick pay considerably more an hour than the wages negotiated under the Compass/IWA contract. These wages are so low that they place the purchasing power of housekeepers, for example, at about what it was 35 years ago.

This represents a tremendous loss for women's work by any standard. It is even more disturbing when one compares the IWA-Aramark contract to a standard IWA contract. Under the IWA master agreement (2000-2003), janitors are paid $21.92 an hour, which is 2.1 times greater than the wage rate negotiated for hospital cleaners.

In this context, the Aramark-IWA agreement is not only a setback for pay equity, it is also a complete rejection of the concept that women and men should be paid equally for the same work -- an understanding that has been in place in Canada since the 1950s.

Double standard deeply troubling

Even as far back as the IWA master agreement of 1983-1986, wage rates for cleaners were not as low as the level negotiated for the women working at VGH. In the mid-'80s, almost 20 years ago, the IWA negotiated $13.48 an hour for its janitors (male) -- $3. 23 an hour more than it is willing to negotiate for its cleaners (female) today.

While the reduction of wages to about half of their existing levels is the most dramatic and obvious change under the IWA-Aramark contract, additional concessions to the employer radically change other aspects of compensation for health care support work. For example, pensions have been eliminated, vacations are reduced to those mandated by the Employment Standards Act, and there are no provisions for parental or maternity leave.

The government's attack on health-care workers provides a precedent that will have far-reaching repercussions. When public sector wages and working conditions deteriorate significantly, it sets an example for the private sector. If the government reduces women's wages, it is a signal to the private sector that they can do the same. Actions to roll back pay-equity gains become endemic across the country.

B.C. has been condemned by a U.N. committee report looking at discrimination against women. It specifically noted the large poverty rates for single mothers, Aboriginal women and women of colour, as well as the negative impact government cuts were having on women and girls. The privatization initiatives such as the ones in health care appear to deepen an already disturbing trend. Not only will women's wages in some sectors deteriorate relative to men, but they are also likely exacerbate an already large and growing gap between different of classes of women workers.

Marjorie Griffin Cohen is a political science professor and chair of the women's studies department at Simon Fraser University. Last year, she was hired by the Hospital Employees Union to research pay equity issues in the health care sector.