Advancing Member Issues: An Interview with Kane Tse

We know that shortages are affecting members province-wide.  I see it and hear about it everywhere I go, from Port Hardy Hospital to Abbotsford Regional Hospital to the Child Development Centre in Prince George.  When I go to meetings of our national union, NUPGE, whether it is at the National Executive Board or at the Health Human Resource meeting, we see that shortages are a problem that spans all across Canada.  

As much as many believe that the simple answer is to hire more staff, there simply aren’t enough specialized health professionals out there looking for work.  A recent analysis by the BC Ministry of Labour projects there will be nearly one million job openings in the next ten years, and 140,000 of those will be in health care.  There simply aren’t enough unemployed highly-skilled workers in our professions out there that we can recruit.

So we are taking an approach at multiple levels.  In the short-term, the Ministry has adopted a number of recruitment bonuses in rural areas and high demand professions. In the medium-term, we are in ongoing discussions with the employer and with government decision makers about the critical need to retain people already in the system through pay increases and better support for people in supervisory positions.  And finally, in the long term, we are looking to increase training spaces, pushing for tuition loan forgiveness and more mentorship and student spaces working alongside you at your workplaces. I’m happy to say we’ve seen some progress on the recruitment and training front, and I’m hoping we will see progress on the retention front soon.

As all our members know, they went through many years of education and training to develop and build their skills, so when I say that training new health science and community social services professionals takes years, this shouldn’t be news.  With decades of governments attacking our health care system, through austerity budgets and at the bargaining table, young people have not seen health care as a possible career, and this has resulted in decreasing enrollment of students who move to other jurisdictions upon graduation. 

Without a doubt, this is an important election for you to be involved in. There is a lot of talk about privatizing health care jobs from some of the parties, and massive cuts in funding to pay for tax cuts. If we see a government come to power with those sorts of priorities, we are going to have a very hard time securing the pay increases we need in the next contract. And other things like the professional development funding so many members have been able to access in the last five years – that would likely dry up completely. 

The priorities for our next contract are entirely determined by our members.  Members will be submitting bargaining proposals at chapter meetings and regional meetings. Those elected as delegates to the bargaining proposal conferences in October and November will review all bargaining proposals and discuss and rank them in order of priority.

The elected bargaining committee will then go to the bargaining table with the employer, likely in 2025.

And finally, once the bargaining committee has arrived at a tentative agreement members will have the final say when they vote on whether to ratify the agreement.