THUNDER BAY – Public health nurses at the Thunder Bay District Health Unit who are calling for better wages and equitable treatment are warning that possible strike action would have significant impacts on patients, programs, and services across the city.
More than 30 nurses held an information picket outside the Thunder Bay District Health Unit office during the lunch hour on Wednesday, as a second day of conciliation talks were set to resume inside.
“We are one of the lowest paid public health nurses in Ontario,” said Becky Bridgman, a public health nurse at the TBDHU. “In perspective, there are 36 health units in Ontario. The comparative would be the Northwestern Public Health Unit in the Dryden/Kenora area, and they make $5 to $6 more an hour than we do. We are just looking to be comparable to our colleagues in the public health system of Ontario.”
The 58 nurses at the Health Unit have been without a collective agreement for 20 months. Bridgman said it is not unusual for talks to take this long, as scheduling can sometimes cause delays. Two days of talks were held last November and a third again in July.
The nurses and the Health Unit began conciliation talks on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday. All the nurses are members of the Ontario Nurses Association and Pat Carr, team lead in labour relations for the ONA, said the two parties remain far apart on a number of issues.
“We are having some meaningful discussions yesterday and today at conciliation,” she said. “We are making progress and hope to continue to do so. If not, we are prepared to move on to the next steps under the labour relations act.”
Last week a strike vote was held with an overwhelming majority voting in favour of strike action if a deal is not reached. Carr said if the two sides are making progress by the end of conciliation on Wednesday, they may book another day of talks. If not, they will ask for a no board, which could see the nurses on the picket line by the end of October.
If the nurses were to take strike action, Bridgman said a number of Health Unit programs would stop, such as the clinical health program, the sexual health program, the outreach program, and the infectious disease program.
“We are already dealing with a tuberculosis outbreak,” she said. “As well as our healthy babies, healthy children. It will affect the community very much.”
“The work that we do in Thunder Bay for public health is extreme, as in anywhere else,” Bridgman continued. “But Thunder Bay and its district, we have a lot of poverty, we have a lot of drug use, we have a lot of social determinants of health issues that we work on. We just want to be treated fairly like the rest of the nurses in Ontario.”
During the lunch hour, more than 30 public health nurses marched around the building as part of the information picket, which Carr said was meant to serve as a reminder of how important these nurses are to the community.
“Our nurses are out here in support because they agree with us that they are entitled to the same rate of pay as the health units surrounding us,” she said. “We are hoping to raise public awareness of what we provide to the community and make the public aware that there may be an impact on programming if we can’t reach a fair and equitable deal.”
