Unrealistic ratios preventing them from doing the expected work, heavy emotional burden, working conditions leading to exhaustion, institutional violence: this is what awaits social workers (TS), special education technicians (TES), teachers, nurses, in short, all those who work in health and social services, in education or at the Department of Youth Protection (DPJ). When you look at this from the outside, you wonder why anyone would go to work for these networks. The answer is simple: these people are capable of taking it.
The conditions that seem so inhuman to you are not really so; they just aren’t for you. There are people who, thanks to their vocation, do not need to be treated like you and me. Imagine the expense if managers had to provide DYP social workers with enough time to do their job. We arrive at the same result, at a lower cost, by counting on their vocation. Do you really think TS will refuse to help a family just because they won’t be paid for their time? If she has the vocation, she will provide the service and pay for the extras from her vocation account. Ditto for volunteering in education, without which no special project would be possible. This is the famous mandatory overtime (TSO) that we never talk about.
Sometimes employees forget to repay their vocation debts. A naive employer would be afraid of losing his employees. A wise manager knows that a good employee not only has a vocation account, but also a line of credit. Thanks to management techniques, we can grow this debt to multiply its impact.
The TSO is a kind of payroll loan; as long as the employee takes the trouble to rest sufficiently between two OSIs, she will not suffer from it. Similarly, there is no need to review the heaviness of the classes. All that is needed is to train teachers to make better use of their vocational capital to remedy the difficulties. If it doesn’t work, we can always hold them accountable. After all, if they don’t have the vocation, it’s not the manager’s fault.
Bad tongues doubt the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, when he says that the TSO will remain a temporary emergency measure for the next three years. Rest assured, the TSO has been an emergency temporary measure for over twenty years, it can be trusted to remain emergency temporary for at least another three years.
Instead of sailing from reform to reform and counting on yet another great man to save the networks from the outside, why not take care of the elephant in the room: the ratios? Why not make a commission to determine once and for all what are the realistic ratios allowing us to accomplish what is expected of these systems? As long as we talk about efficiency without talking about ratios, we will only continue to fund them through the vocation of those who work there.
Why go back to a job who will end up having your skin? There are two reasons: because we solved the problem that pushed you to leave… or because you have no choice. The success or failure of the Dubé-Drainville reform rests almost entirely on the hope that employees will still show self-sacrifice and sacrifice. If they at least committed themselves through a law on ratios, those who quit would know that things will improve. The silence of Dubé and Drainville on the ratios unfortunately says a lot about what we can expect. There will always be a one-off crisis which “prevents” the financing of realistic ratios.