The year 2022 ends with the promise of a difficult, but crucial, negotiation in the public sectors of health and education. We hope that at the end of the negotiations, students and patients will emerge as winners.
In mid-December, the Quebec government tabled employer offers for the 600,000 employees in the public and parapublic sectors; the proposal notably includes salary increases of the order of 9% over a period of five years and is accompanied by a hope of regaining more flexibility and agility, an element that is always found in the wishing trunk of bosses. This is the offer presented by the negotiation trio, made up of the President of the Treasury Board, Sonia LeBel, the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, and the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé.
A sign that the talks are starting without any obvious trace of rapprochement, the unions immediately rejected the proposal. The wage gap is huge, widened in particular by an inflationary economic situation and the demand from employees to protect their purchasing power. The Front commun intersyndical hopes for a salary increase of around 7% per year for three years and salary compensation linked to inflation. Negotiations begin on unstable economic ground. The positions cannot be further apart. It doesn’t bode easy.
In health and education, negotiations are taking place in a unique context of a serious labor shortage which must not escape the government or the unions. In certain key sectors of these two mammoth networks, students shun the study programs, which is worrying for the future. Education and health are now associated with structures where it is not always good to work — work overload, poor organization of resources, lack of personnel, difficult clienteles without the means to adapt — which leads to difficulties major staff retention, sometimes even after very little time spent practicing the profession. The portrait is not rosy. You have to know how to attract future employees and, above all, do everything you can to keep them.
It’s not all a matter of means or resources, as evidenced by the worrying recurrence of certain themes on the menu of negotiations. In education, for example, the question of handicapped students or students with adjustment and learning difficulties has been invited to the negotiation tables for decades, without finding the key so that the classes are not unmanageable for teachers. There are data over which neither Quebec nor the unions have control, such as the fact that class composition inexorably follows the evolution of society. In elementary school, the clientele of children with serious behavioral problems or learning difficulties is constantly growing, not to mention all the children who have problems that are less easy to detect — anxiety problems, for example, which afflict children from an early age — and who risk going under the radar. Teaching has become an art where the ability to adapt is essential to manage to keep some control of the class.
Negotiation after negotiation, this problem reappears, without a miracle solution. The unions are coming this year with a proposal that is at the opposite extreme of “wall to wall”: they are proposing tailor-made teacher/student ratios, designed according to the profile of the children in a class. For a long time, better management was based on the possibility of using support in the classroom — special education technician, remedial teacher, speech therapist, etc. —, but the shortage is also affecting these sectors, which encourages inventiveness. The “tailor-made” would present its share of challenges for school principals, on whom would rest the realization of this colossal task, but in substance, the idea holds water. On the side of the unions, certain paradoxes would benefit from being ironed out, such as the fact that the seniority rules target the environments deemed the most “difficult” for the less experienced. It really doesn’t make any sense.
In healthcare, the critical situation in which the nursing staff finds itself requires an approach centered not only on efficiency, but also on benevolence. This year we have seen an increase in sit in nurses exasperated by excessive TSO (compulsory overtime), to the detriment of their health and time spent with family, for example. Flexibility cannot be demanded of union groups alone, because in this matter, it is up to Quebec to show openness and creativity.
These negotiations will be difficult, because of the difficult economic context, but also because of the scarcity of labor and the contexts of work overload that we must recognize in both education and health. Let us hope that the parties involved do not forget the citizens on whom the outcome of these exchanges will reflect, whether they are patients or students.