The strong method no longer works

Since the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, explained that he could not follow through on his threat to send home all unvaccinated health workers, what have we not heard: is a loss of state authority. It is the triumph of the antivax. It is a State which cannot stand up to its unions …

The comparison that comes up periodically in similar cases is that of Ronald Reagan who fired the 11,000 air traffic controllers on illegal strike. In fact, he had done much better than that: the controllers had been banned for life from all government jobs.

But before asking Mr. Dubé to use the Reagan method, we must remember the context of the time. The United States was then grappling with high inflation (just over 10%) and high unemployment (around 8%) – higher than in Canada at the same time.

The problem was not a labor shortage, but a shortage of jobs. With high inflation in addition, which pushed union demands upwards. Thus, the union of air traffic controllers (PATCO) asked for an overall increase of $ 600 million over three years, the employer’s offer being $ 40 million.

While the union said it would take at least three years to train new air traffic controllers, in just 10 days, half of them had already been replaced. The executives, repentant strikers and military air traffic controllers had filled the positions. It must be said that there were around 10,000 air traffic controllers – civilian and military – who worked for the Department of Defense and who were made available, although not all of them were used.

Needless to say, Mr. Dubé does not have such a wealth of available and labor-intensive labor. Everyone has seen the government’s efforts to fill the 4,000 nursing positions. And, according to government figures, there will be more than 60,000 positions to be filled within five years in the health network and a third of the 75,000 nurses will have to be replaced.

And the labor shortage is such that a similar situation exists among several other groups of government employees. As a result, the balance of power between the employer and its employees is reversed. We saw this when the government granted a substantial increase to daycare educators even before the contract was signed.

Advice, therefore, to those who think that it is enough to be “tough like Reagan” to solve the problems: we no longer live in the same world.

Increasingly, when working conditions are no longer acceptable, workers – and not just those in the health sector – leave their jobs knowing that they can easily find better things.

Already, the government’s idea of ​​issuing an ultimatum to healthcare workers to get vaccinated posed great risks to its credibility. Ultimatums in labor relations are proof of what we call in economics the “law of diminishing returns”: we can let a deadline pass, as we have just done. But we cannot do it a second time without losing all credibility.

However, Mr. Dubé is right, the other option was worse. As cancer treatments are stopped when they endanger the health of the patient, Mr. Dubé could not take the risk of “running into the wall”, to use his own expression, and condemn the health network to even more disruption, cancellations and “mandatory overtime”.

But, while waiting for the new deadline of November 15, the network must be prepared for a difficult period. It is perhaps reasonable to think that the 7000 employees of the health network who received their first dose of vaccine will want to receive the second. But there will still be 15,000 to convince, which will be much less simple.

What health authorities need to do now is prepare the system for the staffing shortages that are bound to occur in mid-November. We have to start thinking that more employees will refuse to be vaccinated rather than the other way around.

In this regard, the leaders of the CIUSSS de l’Estrie, at a press conference on Friday morning, said they expected few new vaccines. In this region, 982 healthcare workers are not adequately vaccinated and only 300 of them are expected to comply with the mandatory vaccination by mid-November. There is no reason to believe that the picture will be radically different in other regions.

In short, even with a further delay of one month, the health network will lose employees, despite the very real consequences for the recalcitrant. But also inevitable service disruptions for patients.