“The global care economy is in crisis. Here in Canada, underfunding, privatization and a lack of resources and supports for care workers has led to critical understaffing,” said Bea Bruske, President of the Canadian Labour Congress. “Each of us will need care at some point in our lives, but the shameful undervaluing of care workers – who are mostly women – has brought our care systems to the brink of collapse. Care workers are there for us during some of our most vulnerable moments, so we must support them in demanding better. Governments can’t claim to want to achieve pay equity while simultaneously ignoring the care crisis.”

In Canada, care jobs employ roughly one fifth of all workers, with women occupying 75% of those positions. Canada benefits greatly from both paid and unpaid care, with these services contributing tens of billions of dollars to the country’s economy. But successive rounds of cuts and concerted efforts at privatizing services have created a patchwork system, which is struggling under the weight of chronic underfunding and now, a global pandemic.

Meanwhile unpaid care, which is most often done by women, can impact women’s participation in the job market. Care responsibilities can significantly hinder a woman’s ability to access and maintain a good, stable job with decent pay.

Canada’s unions recently launched Show We Care, a national campaign aimed at raising the profile of care workers in Canada and addressing the mounting care crisis.

In Canada, it is estimated that the increased demands for care driven by the ageing population will add $93 billion to health care costs by 2028. And yet, according to the OECD, Canada falls near the bottom among wealthy countries in public expenditure on social services. The tragic losses of life in for-profit long-term care homes point to the failures of the private, for-profit model. These institutions have less staff, fewer hours of care per resident, more complaints from residents and family, more acute care hospital admissions, and higher mortality rates than public long-term care homes.

“Chronic underfunding has led to an erosion of available care, which has drastically increased the cost of care services. In addition to insufficient wages, poor working conditions, lack of support for workers, and harassment and violence in the workplace are driving workers out of the care sector,” said Siobhán Vipond, Executive Vice President of the CLC “To mark International Equal Pay Day, Canada’s unions are calling on our federal government to make immediate investments across all care sectors, to lift wages for underpaid care workers and ensure good jobs that result in high quality care for people in Canada and their families.”

International Equal Pay Day – marked annually on September 18 – was created by the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 and first marked in 2020.

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The images, the stories, the experiences of our seniors during this pandemic are enough to bring a grown man to tears.

In fact, it has.

Even Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford has, at times, become emotional while talking about the conditions in the province’s long-term care facilities. It’s a dire situation right across the country.

No one is doubting the sincerity of every single politician who is expressing frustration and helplessness at the pandemic’s scourge within these facilities. But we do have to question why it took the global crisis, hundreds of deaths and intervention by the armed forces for the message to finally get through: our system is broken.

It’s a message that unions and advocates have been communicating for decades. Long-term care should never have become the hodgepodge of private-public system it is today. This system has allowed for-profit agencies to take significant control, some of them led by politicians like Mike Harris who handed over 68% of 20,000 new spaces created during his tenure to the private sector. Ironically, Harris is now the Chair of the Board of Directors at Chartwell, a private company that runs many long-term care facilities.

Just over a year ago, the head of SEIU Healthcare joined fellow union members and advocates at Queen’s Park to call for better treatment and pay for workers in these facilities, which receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the government. By the way, the CEOs of these facilities have in the past received more than $9.2 million dollars of public money with nary a peep out of the same Premier who is now upset about the state of things.

The expansive growth of the private long-term care industry has led to a further devaluing of care work and driven down workers’ wages in order to boost corporate and shareholder profits. 

What we are witnessing is no accident. The horrific conditions that frontline care workers now describe occurred in spite of repeated warnings that have persisted for years.

Facilities are led by managers and owners who are looking after the bottom line, not the well-being of some of society’s most vulnerable. This has meant that workers are paid very little, forced to take on multiple shifts at different facilities and paid just under full-time hours so owners avoid paying benefits and therefore failing to adequately care for staff who take care of their clients.

“Private, for-profit services are necessarily more fragmented, more prone to closure and focused on making a profit. The research demonstrates that homes run on a for-profit basis tend to have lower staffing levels, more verified complaints and more transfers to hospitals, as well as higher rates for both ulcers and morbidity,” conclude Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Jacqueline Choiniere, Ruth Lowndes and James Struthers in a recent research paper titled Re-imagining Long-term Residential Care in the COVID-19 Crisis.

It’s time to fix what is broken. The only way to do that is to take immediate steps to make private for-profit long-term care facilities part of the public health care system aligned with the principles of the Canada Health Act.

In fact, it is the exclusion from the Act that has allowed for the proliferation of private for-profit care in our country. We have repeatedly called on the federal and provincial governments to stop the funding cuts and to ameliorate the health care system so every Canadian can access vital health care services based on need, not an ability to pay. 

Whether you are worried about a loved one, or whether you or someone you know is one of the invaluable workers caring for Canada’s seniors, this is the solution we need.

Besides, we’re all ageing. Someday, it may be one of us on the other side of the window, looking out at a world that failed us.

Unless we act now.

Hassan Yussuff is the president of the Canadian Labour Congress. Follow him on Twitter @Hassan_Yussuff

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Within ten days, about 2,500 workers in six hospitals and nine nursing homes were on wildcat strikes and hundreds of other health care workers joined work-to-rule and other worker solidarity efforts. Premier Ralph Klein could only watch in horror as his budget cuts backfired.

Alberta’s Conservative government eliminated tens of thousands of public sector jobs between 1993 and 1994 while cutting the wages and benefits of the workers who remained. The 1994 budget delivered a 20% cut in health care, a 21% cut in post secondary education and a 12.4% cut in K-12 education. Welfare rolls were cut in half over one year. Within two years, Alberta program spending declined by over 21%. Homelessness climbed 740% during the Klein years in office.

The labour movement, overwhelmed by the ferocity of the government’s attack on people to delivered essential services, was left struggling to respond. So, when the Klein-appointed Calgary Health Authority moved to further the province’s privatization agenda by contracting out the jobs of Calgary hospital laundry workers, it expected little resistance. They were wrong.

The workers had already taken a 28% cut in the previous round of bargaining in order to keep their jobs. They had given enough to “King Ralph” and were determined not to become pawns in the Conservative’s game plan to destroy the public sector.

The first to respond were 60 laundry workers at the Calgary General Hospital, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. When they learned that their jobs would be handed over to K-Bro Linens in Edmonton, they all called in sick. Workers at the Foothills Hospital where the laundry workers were members of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, followed suit the following day.

Within ten days, about 2,500 workers in six hospitals and nine nursing homes were on wildcat strikes and hundreds of other health care workers joined work-to-rule and other worker solidarity efforts. Trade unionists from outside the health sector as well as many members of the general public demonstrated solidarity with the strikers on their picket line and in public rallies.

Premier Klein watched in horror as his carefully orchestrated dismantling of public services in Alberta seemed to crumble. The Calgary Health Authority, under pressure from the government, offered the unions a delay in contracting out of 18 months, long enough for most of the affected workers to find other jobs. The “tough guy” government of Ralph Klein had blinked and it was a group of mainly immigrant women workers who had caused it to blink.

The courage displayed by the laundry workers inspired a wave of strikes and job actions by other health care workers; licensed practical nurses and general support service workers repeatedly took part in some of the largest walk outs in Alberta’s history during the closing years of that decade.

While the laundry workers’ victory was a partial one, the events that they set in motion marked a victory for all Alberta working people. The cuts and privatizations largely stopped for several years and the government began reinvesting in public services however modestly.

“I would just like to add to that, and that is that after the laundry workers’ strike the Klein government was a different animal than before the laundry workers’ strike. Before that, as Tom said, they were ideologically driven, they refused to discuss. There was no discussion of any of their policies, they were simply enacted. After that they became much more of a kind of populist government. Yes, they still had their ideological conditioning, but they looked before they leapt. They compromised, they backed off of things. If it looked like people were ready to make a fight out of things, they backed off. They did not come in and take people on directly that way again I don’t think, and I think that was a victory for the labour movement.”

Jim Selby interview.

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Source: Alberta Labour History Institute

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