Seniority is a sacrosanct union rule. It is proof of everything and takes precedence over everything. It is easy to understand and simple to apply. It is sort of the automatic pilot of management.
In nurses’ unions, seniority rules are applied with extraordinary rigidity. They are even implemented establishment by establishment.
For example, if a nurse leaves a hospital to hold the same job in a hospital center located a few kilometers away, in the same city, her experience will only be used to determine her salary. For all other working conditions, she will be treated as a beginner. She will be the last to choose her shift (day, evening, night, weekend). The same will most likely be true for access to a position of greater responsibility.
Do we imagine that with such rules, we will attract nurses to the Rosemont hospital in order to stem the crisis so decried, in particular by the nurses’ union?
Relying on age-old seniority, older nurses, those who no longer have young children at home, obviously serve first. No more night work. And even less to sacrifice part of his summer vacation. We have the right to choose and we choose the best. Let the young nurses do their time. And too bad if they have children or a spouse who works in the construction sector where vacation periods are fixed in advance. Work-family balance is our union’s message. It can’t tag seniority. We too have principles.
This is how seniority rules poison the lives of young nurses. They are relegated to the worst working conditions. Conditions that do not fit well with their family life.
Still, a modicum of empathy should allow some sharing of the burden of the more difficult work. Oh no, well-established nurses even threaten to resign en masse if we think of asking them to work a weekend from time to time. Experienced nurses, at least a majority of them, tell themselves that their career began in difficult or painful conditions and that it is their turn to benefit from the “best places”.
Exactly. Because they’ve been there before, experienced nurses should know the cost of working non-standard hours. They might also realize that the world has changed and that today’s young women no longer have the same tolerance for corporate selfishness.
There are no doubt a good number of generous nurses who agree to share the burden and who refuse to abuse the prerogatives conferred on them by their armored collective agreement. They then act in spite of their union.
Above all, the nurses’ union should not be counted on to influence trends, make corrections or simply relax the application of seniority rules. His main job is to watch the autopilot and make sure the government won’t throw it off course. The union does not even want to sit down with the government to discuss it. There would be danger in the house.
However, this union is the master brawler on the working conditions of nurses and the lack of attractiveness of the profession. It even lacks the accusatory vocabulary to attack the employer government on all fronts.
If it adopted a somewhat collaborative attitude, the nurses’ union would come to the conclusion that it can contribute to improving the lot of nurses. But he prefers to watch from the side, because he has never managed anything and he only knows how to react with defensive and aggressive reflexes which have not changed for decades.
It would certainly be dishonest to blame the unions for the disorganization that has plagued the health care system for a very long time. But when a team of ministers expresses, with a clarity that we have rarely seen, the intention to correct certain recurring problems, the union should respond to this rather than continuing its miserly attitude.
Obviously, the ministers are politicians, that is to say, eminently questionable beings. But if, by some happy chance, they were in good faith, what would the nurses’ union have to lose?