As part of its negotiations with public sector unions, Quebec wishes to extend the work week of certain employees in the health and social services network. The normal workweek would thus go from 35 to 37.5 hours.
A dozen job titles would be affected, such as extern in medical technology, criminologist, health technician working in medical laboratories, health technician in medical imaging and others, indicated in an interview Friday Josée Fréchette, first vice -President of the Alliance of Professional and Technical Personnel in Health and Social Services (APTS).
Mme Fréchette recalls that there is a shortage of manpower in the health and social services sector and that the workers in post are often exhausted.
“Our people still lived through the whole pandemic. They gave a lot. There is some fatigue. And there, we want to keep them longer; we want to impose more time on them at work, when our people are already tired of the pandemic, are overloaded, ”she laments.
“For us, this is not an improvement. We are in contradiction, because the government wants to attract, retain people and provide good conditions and, at the same time, we increase working hours, ”she laments.
Invited to comment, the Secretariat of the Treasury Board explained that “to rapidly increase the availability of labor in a context of shortage, it is necessary in particular to rearrange work schedules”.
“In exchange for greater availability, the offers ultimately allow better predictability of staff schedules, an increase in income and retirement pensions,” added the Treasury Board.
Redefining overtime
In its offer, Quebec also wishes to “redefine what constitutes overtime, in particular by removing the notion of overtime beyond the regular working day”, reports Ms.me Frechette.
What exactly does that mean? “It’s not clear to us. The unions say they need clarification from the ministry and the Treasury Board.
“We really have the impression that this measure would be to camouflage overtime and compulsory overtime in a day and to want to save money on the backs of employees,” she summarizes.
She also wonders if this redefinition of what overtime really is is not also intended to “make the minister’s dashboards look better”, by artificially reducing the numbers.
Still, there are positives. “In the deposit [du gouvernement], there are some measures that may be of interest. But overall, it’s not up to our expectations,” concludes Josée Fréchette.
For its part, the Conseil du trésor explains that “the management’s proposals are part of a context of labor shortage which requires that we quickly review the ways of organizing work in order to offer the population the care and services to which she is entitled, while ensuring respect for the staff. The long-term objective is to reduce overtime”.
He did not wish to say more “out of respect for the ongoing negotiation process”.
The APTS is the labor organization that represents the vast majority of professionals and technicians in health and social services. It is part of the inter-union common front, with the CSN, the CSQ and the FTQ. The various unions in the four organizations together represent 420,000 members.