Union endorsed evaluations but didn’t take part

OPSEU president denies union was asked to take part

The union that represents clerical workers at Peterborough Regional Health Centre (PRHC) could have participated in the re-evaluation that led to wage freezes but declined to do so, says the hospital spokesperson — an assertion the union flatly denies.

Now the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU) is running “attack ads” on radio and in newspapers, referring to the hospital CEO as a “grinch”, states a new hospital press release — and the hospital doesn’t like it.

A total of 247 clerical jobs were recently re-evaluated, and OPSEU says 244 were downgraded so the wages will be frozen for up to eight years.

But hospital spokeswoman Michelene Ough has offered different figures: she has written to The Examiner that 33 of those 247 employees won’t have their wages affected at all.

On Thursday Ough wrote that the union had endorsed the process of job re-evaluations and that it had been invited to participate in the process but declined.

“Now it is complaining loudly and publicly that it is surprised at the outcome of the process it endorsed,” Ough stated in the release.

“The question people should be asking themselves is why the union would chose to publicly attack one of the best-paying employers for clerical workers in the province — a hospital where part-time clerical employees can

earn more than $30,000 working 22 hours a week, and full-time clerical workers can bring in more than $60,000 a year,” Ough stated.

“We receive hundreds of applications for these positions; these are highly sought-after jobs.”

But Smokey Thomas, the provincial president of OPSEU, stated in an email to The Examiner on Thursday that it isn’t true the union was asked to participate in the job re-evaluations.

“The collective agreement allows the employer to do unilateral job evaluations,” he wrote. “When the employer put the union on notice that they were doing this, as per the collective agreement, they were not inviting the union to participate.”

Thomas also wrote that the union is right to speak up: nobody likes a wage freeze, he writes, no matter how well-paid they happen to be.

“In this case the hypocrisy of the CEO is remarkable,” Thomas writes. “He gets big raises and thinks his employees should just shut up.”

Dr. Peter McLaughlin, the president and CEO of the hospital, earns about $400,000 a year.

While OPSEU has pointed out that his salary has gone up 21 per cent in three years, Ough has written that it was because McLaughlin was promoted from chief of staff to interim CEO (after the previous CEO departed from the job suddenly) and then promoted again to permanent CEO.

“OPSEU’s attacks on the hospital and its CEO, a respected cardiologist and hospital leader, are at minimum very puzzling given the circumstances,” Ough states in the release.

The release also questions why OPSEU would use its members’ “hard-earned dollars” on an “attack-ad campaign” aimed at McLaughlin and the hospital.

“Our members’ hard-earned dollars are for these kinds of situations,” Thomas wrote. “Whatever it takes is what we will do.”