Despite “heartbreaking choices” that had to be made, the FIQ negotiated “a good agreement” in principle, which includes “interesting advances,” argues its president, Julie Bouchard.
In an interview with The Canadian Press on Wednesday, the president of the Interprofessional Health Federation was keen to defend this agreement in principle, criticized by some on social networks. The FIQ recommends to its members to approve this agreement obtained after 15 months of negotiations and days of strike.
Ms. Bouchard cites several gains, including the start of work to implement nurse-patient ratios — a request from the FIQ “for 10 years”. She also underlines the fact of having “succeeded in getting the government to back down” on the forced movements of nurses. “Someone can do it voluntarily, but the employer does not have the right to impose it. »
She also cites a statement on TSO, mandatory overtime, against which the FIQ has been fighting for years. “We never had any legal lever, in the collective agreement, to allow us to make managers accountable,” explains M.me Bouchard.
“This time, there is this definition which says that under no other pretext than for an urgent measure [et] exceptional, managers cannot keep a healthcare professional on mandatory overtime. This may seem trivial to many people, but for us, it is a very important lever. » A sign of the scale of the problem for the FIQ and its members: no less than 30,000 grievances, individual or collective, have been filed because of the TSO.
Among other gains, she also reports bonuses for the holidays and summer, when recruiting staff is always more difficult. She also notes an opening on overtime at double rate during the weekends.
Compromises
She admits that the FIQ had to make compromises, as is the case with any negotiation. “Where we had to make this concession, truly heartbreaking; we really had to stand on our backs to be able to open it, it was in the activity center. And for us, it was the lesser evil. »
She explains that with the creation of Santé Québec, which will become the sole employer in the network, local collective agreements will have to be renegotiated. “We have been marking out, at the level of the center of activities, on the mergers of centers of activities, how far the employer can go. We went to ensure that the issue of training was a priority. »
Such mergers of activity centers were already possible. “What we added as a guideline” is that before the healthcare professional finds herself in a merged activity center, “she must have had all the required training.” so that she is “not tied up in the activity center without having had anything first”, explains Mme Bouchard.
Manage managers
Asked about the criticisms addressed by some of its members, skeptical of measures to tighten the use of TSO or voluntary travel, Ms. Bouchard attributes them to the “extremely broken bond of trust over the years”, because of the managers of the network of health.
“The government must manage its managers, talk with its managers, so that what has been negotiated is implemented” in health establishments, argues the union leader.
The 80,000 members of the FIQ will be called to vote on April 10, 11 and 12 in a referendum vote. In the meantime, the content of the agreement is available on the FIQ website. And members will be able to ask questions during local meetings that will be held between now and then.
“The question to ask is: what are we going to do if we reject the agreement in principle? We went on strike; we did lots of things. Now, we have a good agreement in principle on the table. So, the other question is really: what are we prepared to do to perhaps obtain something different? » concludes Mme Bouchard.