No3 – February 2024
Following disappointment and rollback demands,
now it’s contradiction time
Since last year, the MSSS’s representatives have continually emphasized the importance of maintaining the level of healthcare delivered to the public by our members, and once again last week they repeated their demands for added constraints on our ability to take the different types of leave, including vacation time, stressing the importance of better care planning. This could at least mean our counterparts were fully aware of our indispensable contribution to the care delivered to the public. But no . . . unfortunately, their words were just hot air, on top of confirming that they are clearly not giving any consideration at all to the objectives behind our demands.
While the MSSS’s representatives constantly put off responding to our monetary and salary proposals, at last week’s bargaining session they categorically refused our main salary demand, in a surprising, contradictory manner. Remember, this demand involves comparing resident doctors’ compensation with the other healthcare employees’, taking into account in particular the different groups’ respective responsibilities, years of education required, and number of hours of work performed. This type of objective, structured salary comparison approach already exists for the different employee groups in the healthcare sector.
But in order to justify their sudden new refusal to compare our compensation with Quebec’s other healthcare employees—wait for it—the MSSS’s representatives started presenting a litany of what they considered to be “privileges” set out in the collective agreement that we were lucky to have since we were, after all, mere “learners.”
And that session, held February 16 in Quebec City, ended at 4:15 pm with MSSS representatives unwilling to get back to us about demands presented in the previous session, expressing their unwillingness to address monetary and salary questions before coming back, yet again, on their repeated demands for constraints on the ability to take leave, as if their intention was to block the negotiations on this point of contention.
So, if you see their response the way we do:
- The MSSS claims not to want to make us work more, but obstinately insists on maintaining demands that would have the effect of limiting our ability to take the different types of leave, including annual vacation;
- The MSSS claims not to want to talk about our salary and monetary demands before finishing discussions about the demands with no monetary impact, but they have just refused our main salary demand;
- The MSSS claims we are health professionals whose significant delivery of care categorically cannot be revised downward when it comes time to object to our demands for arranging schedules and call duty so as to reduce our substantial workload while maintaining the service offering;
- On the other hand, though, the MSSS’s representatives view us as mere “learners” with supposed “privileges” when their goal is to object to comparing our compensation with other healthcare employee groups’ pay.
Inadvertent contradictions or bad faith?
We will avoid addressing that question at this stage, but in any event, they do not look very serious.
Do members feel “privileged” that they can be forced to work days, evenings, and nights, at least two weekends a month, up to 19 days in a row for a salary which, calculated per hour worked, lags considerably behind any other care team members’ salary?
That is the question we will be asking the Delegates’ Assembly at the meeting this coming March 16 when we present a mobilization plan that will reflect the regrettable evolution of our negotiations.
Another bargaining session is scheduled in early March, but so far, unfortunately, we hold out little hope for any positive developments in the negotiations without a significant change of direction. And that change may possibly occur only if our members make themselves heard as the other public sector employees regrettably had to do last fall. We would prefer to devote ourselves to our residency and continue delivering care in our training sites, but we have to observe that, beyond our counterparts’ fine words about “reasoned” negotiations, we will likely have to find ways of collectively expressing the fact that there is nothing “reasonable” about the current situation.
Watch this space!
Your Negociating Committee | 
