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why quebec nurses submitted a complaint to the u.n. over 'forced labour'
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in other industries, there are limits for how long employees can perform a job before it becomes dangerous. it is not the same for nurses. getty
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quebec’s largest nursing union has filed a complaint with the international labour organization, an agency of the united nations, for what they call “forced labour” and “abusive” working conditions for nurses.
“there’s no reason it should be this way,” julie bouchard, president of the fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé (fiq), told healthing in a french-language interview. “we’re seeing a major exodus of healthcare workers, who are leaving the public system — either for placements in the private system, or for jobs outside of health — because they can’t work under these conditions anymore.”
‘the right not to accept the unacceptable’
nurses are crucial to the public health system, she says. “they have the right not to accept the unacceptable.”
fiq, which represents 76,000 nurses and other healthcare professionals across quebec, is objecting specifically to mandatory overtime. bouchard says it has been a problem for years before the pandemic, but the last two years have been much more difficult. health-care workers should only be forced to work overtime in rare and extraordinary situations, she says — but it has become a normal occurrence.
according to la presse, quebec nurses have worked a half a million overtime hours in a single fiscal year between 2020 and 2021 — sometimes representing more than 10 or 15 per cent of all hours worked.
‘forced labour’
as an auxiliary nurse, bouchard sometimes picks up shifts. but regularly, before an eight-hour shift is over, she’ll be told she has to work a second consecutive eight-hour shift — whether she feels she’s capable or not.
“it completely goes against the conventions that canada has signed on to,” she says. “my employer can’t authorize me to stay at work for overtime if i don’t consent. if they force us to stay, it becomes forced labour.”
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mandatory overtime specifically violates conventions 29 and 105 of the agreements canada has signed with the international labour board, bouchard says. both conventions deal with forced labour, described as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”
bouchard says mandatory overtime violates both nurses’ labour rights and diminishes the care their patients will receive. returning to work the day after an unplanned sixteen-hour day, for instance, means “our physical and psychological capacity is enormously diminished,” she says. “if we’re tired, if we’re burned out, if we can’t concentrate, the risk of error — in administering medicine, or in the care technique we’re trying to do — is dramatically amplified. it’s not just us who are at risk: if we’re not providing quality care, our patients are also at risk. both parties will inevitably suffer.”
in other industries, there are limits for how long employees can perform a job before it becomes dangerous. bouchard points out that no truck drivers in quebec can work more than 70 hours over a period of seven consecutive days, for instance, for roadside safety reasons.
“so how come for us, looking after patients, with their lives in our hands, how come that limit doesn’t apply to us?” she says. “mandatory overtime has just been the way work has been for too long, and it will take a major political shift to be able to fix it. it’s not how a workplace should function, and it’s contributing to the shortage of healthcare professionals in our network.”
the nursing shortage is dramatic across the country, but quebec has been hit particularly hard. in september, the province’s premier françois legault said quebec was missing about 4,000 nurses. since last summer, hospitals in montreal, gatineau, charlevoix and the eastern townships are among the centres that have closed or scaled back on emergency room services because they didn’t have enough nurses to keep them running.
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while workplace conditions make it completely understandable that nurses would leave the profession in dramatic numbers, says bouchard, it makes the conditions even worse for the nurses who remain.
“we never know what time we are going to leave work,” patrick guay, vice-president of the fiq’s department of labour relations, told cbc news last year, after the fiq sent formal notices to regional and provincial health authorities alerting them that they would not extra hours on the weekend of oct. 16 to 17. they also asked for the practice of forcing employees to work overtime to end by the following month.
“it has an impact on our families, it has an impact on the overall [health] network,” guay said.
clearly, though, the move didn’t have the effect fiq had hoped for. the province’s health minister christian dubé said mandatory overtime is difficult to get rid of completely.
“we don’t want any more mandatory overtime … but there’s no magic wand,” he said. “we’re not going to be able to go from five, six, seven per cent usage of mandatory overtime in certain regions to zero tomorrow morning. it’s not possible.”
women’s work ‘as important as men’s work’
because fiq’s members are mostly women — bouchard says 90 per cent — she believes there’s an element of gender discrimination, too. “many of our members are single parents, or have other family care obligations,” she says. “they have the right to normal, predictable work schedules.”
she doesn’t think a majority male workforce would be treated the same way.
“we still have this image of women working in care who don’t have their own needs,” she says. “there’s a lot of education that still needs to be done with the general public to recognize the work women do, and to consider it as important as men’s work.”
but bouchard knows it could take months or years before the international labour organization makes any kind of ruling on fiq’s complaint.
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“what we wanted to demonstrate was that despite all the interventions that our union has done over many years, the government has continued to do nothing, to say ‘we don’t have a choice, we won’t be able to provide care without mandatory overtime,'” she says. “we wanted to accentuate political pressure, to say, ‘this isn’t acceptable in our workplaces or in our health networks. this was never acceptable.'”
for quebec’s public health system to keep going, the province has to make major changes, she says.
“maybe then people will be more interested in working in public health, because right now that’s not the case.”
quebec’s health department told healthing they won’t be commenting on fiq’s labour complaint. a spokesperson added that mandatory overtime “is not desirable,” and that health authorities are using “all the means at their disposal to avoid it.”
maija kappler is a reporter and editor at healthing. you can reach her at mkappler@postmedia.com
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