To reduce waiting lists at the Youth Protection Department (DPJ), network workers will now be entitled to a new bonus. Their union reached an “exceptional agreement” on Tuesday that will allow them to receive incentives of up to $170 for working overtime.
The agreement reached with the Legault government is not part of the Common Front agreements signed earlier this year. Valid until 2028, it will offer certain youth protection workers “additional bonuses of $140 to $170 per full shift worked overtime.”
These amounts will be made available to employees assigned to processing reports, evaluating them, or even “applying measures” — i.e. monitoring cases. The only downside: they can only be paid when “the waiting lists reach a critical level”.
“We have ministerial targets. To enable us to achieve them, we will pay for this work 24/7,” said the Minister responsible for Social Services, Lionel Carmant, on Tuesday, when approached by Duty before question period.
According to the latest data from the Ministry of Health and Social Services, the waiting time for an evaluation at the DPJ reached almost 50 days.
With its new bonus offered to stakeholders, François Legault’s government wishes to “improve the agreement for the DPJ” that it concluded in January with the Alliance of Professional and Technical Personnel in Health and Social Services (APTS), at as a member of the Union Common Front. “It’s important for the workers, who do an extremely difficult job. I have always said that we must promote their work,” said Lionel Carmant on Tuesday.
In April, several DPJ workers said in the pages of the Duty having “left their appetite” at the end of the negotiations between their union and the Treasury Board. Especially since, a few months earlier, Minister Carmant had assured them that he was working hard to offer them “significant” salary increases.
“Short term” solution
Even if his teams accepted this new bonus, in order to “reduce the waiting lists” once and for all, the president of the APTS, Robert Comeau, cannot help but think that this is a question of ‘a temporary solution. Contacted on Tuesday, he deplored that the government did not take advantage of last year’s negotiations to offer more structural advantages to DPJ stakeholders.
“I don’t think it will have a very big effect in retaining people. It will have an effect on waiting lists, probably, but it does not bring additional hands into the network,” he commented on the other end of the phone.
“Yes, they made an effort in the last negotiation, but here we continually resolve one thing to create a problem elsewhere. […] What we will process quickly at the entrance will be rushed at the exit,” he added.
Robert Comeau assures that he is “committed to ensuring that reports are processed as quickly as possible”, which is why the union he represents has put its signature at the bottom of a new targeted agreement with Quebec. “We share the objective, but it is the means on which we agree a little less,” he said. “We are convinced that this is short term and that it will not solve anything in the long term. »
During the last public sector negotiations, DPJ workers saw their salaries increased by 17.4% until 2028 in addition to being allocated a bonus of 6% to 10% calculated according to the number of hours worked. This replaces another bonus of 7% previously offered to stakeholders.