OPINIONS HEALTH CARE
OT war ends with whimper
OK, what was that all about?
Over the summer, Nova Scotia’s health authorities quietly abandoned a very public scrap they started with healthcare unions over how to calculate overtime for nurses and other unionized employees. How serious was that fight? Serious enough that last winter, nurses began refusing OT shifts, affecting services, managers said. Serious enough that NSNU president Janet Hazelton warned that some rural hospitals could be forced to close due to a lack of nurses.
Serious enough to say the health-care system was in an uproar.
If you don’t recall the details, here’s a recap.
Last fall, the Nova Scotia Health Authority and IWK Health Centre notified the provincial council of health-care unions (NSNU, NSGEU, CUPE and UNIFOR) they planned to re-interpret language in their collective agreements concerning calculation of overtime.
Past practice had been to count hours “paid” over a pay period, including vacations and sick time, to determine overtime pay. The NSHA and IWK wanted to change that to hours “worked,” meaning vacation and sick days would be excluded.
In other words, an employee would no longer be able to count their sick or vacation days in a pay period to determine if they qualified for overtime.
All four unions filed grievances over the change.
But the dispute became public when the new overtime rule was applied to the nurses’ new contract in February. Nurses began refusing to pick up OT shifts.
Later that month, the NDP released figures that showed the health authority spent almost five times more on overtime ($19.145 million) for registered nurses in 2018 than had been budgeted ($4.195 million).
Was that part of the reason the health authorities wanted to reinterpret how overtime was calculated?
Meanwhile, Hazelton proposed that the health authorities revert to the previous OT understanding until the matter could be settled through talks or arbitration.
Which is exactly what happened. In late April, the NSHA and IWK — while maintaining they were right — rolled back the change on an interim basis, pending either future talks with the unions or arbitration.
Premier Stephen McNeil publicly chided the health authorities for moving without union agreement or an arbitrator’s decision. But he made it clear he backed the health authorities’ OT interpretation.
“We believe the position that we’re taking is the right one, but let’s let an independent third party determine whether or not our interpretation of that overtime rule is right,” McNeil told reporters.
In case there’s any question, in light of what happened later, NSHA and IWK public statements, as well as internal documents obtained through freedom of information requests, from last spring underline their commitment to their OT re-interpretation.
“We feel it is reasonable to expect that unionized employees work their scheduled hours before they are eligible for additional overtime pay. That will be resolved through arbitration,” states an April NSHA internal document.
“Monitoring staffing budgets and ensuring that employees are accurately compensated helps contribute to the effective management and delivery of quality patient care services. At the same time we must also remain sustainable in terms of the costs to the health care system.”
A May 22 message from Steve Ashton, IWK vice president, people & organization development, said the IWK was referring the OT grievance to arbitration.
“Our pursuit of this grievance to arbitration is to ensure that the IWK has clear, legal support for what we believe is the proper application of collective agreement language that already exists, and management’s rights to apply that language appropriately and in a fiscally responsible manner for the taxpayers we serve,” Ashton said in the message, obtained through FOI.
An internal government email from Department of Health communication director Dan Harrison on the same day in late May noted the NSHA’s OT issue would not go forward until after summer.
Then a funny thing happened. Nothing at all.
According to officials with several of the unions, by late August — hearing nothing from either NSHA or IWK — they withdrew their grievances. Since the OT language was being interpreted as in the past, there was, in effect, nothing to grieve. They retained the right to restart the grievances.
So what happened to the NSHA/IWK’s plan to go to arbitration?
Why did they abandon their resolve to, as Ashton put it, fight for their “fiscally responsible” interpretation of OT language in the collective agreements?
“Both IWK and NSHA are in the same position,” NSHA spokeswoman Carla Adams said in an email. “The grievances filed by the unions have been withdrawn, and therefore there is no arbitration scheduled.”
Wait a minute, what? The unions withdrew their grievances because there was nothing to grieve.
The question is, why did the health authorities abandon arbitration? To that, there was no answer.
I followed up by asking if the health authorities now intended to stick with the original OT interpretation.
“Our previous response is what we can provide for now. It would be inappropriate to discuss labour strategy further through the media,” Adams said in an email.
Meanwhile, what about Premier McNeil, who last spring publicly stated he felt the health authorities were right?
“The premier stands by the comments made in April,” David Jackson, a spokesman in the premier’s office, said in an email on Friday. “The Nova Scotia Health Authority and IWK are the employers and made the decision to change direction.”
So, there you have it.
Last summer, I had sent freedom of information requests to the NSHA, IWK and Department of Health, asking for any documentation, going back to the start of 2018, on the decision to re-interpret overtime in health-care unions’ contracts. Based on the hundreds of pages I finally received in recent weeks, unfortunately 95 per cent of it (or more) redacted, it looks like there was a lot of time and energy spent on this file.
The controversy provoked nurses to refuse OT shifts, leading to staffing headaches in an already stressed health-care system.
When the health authorities agreed to put the OT change on hold in April, they — backed by the premier — made it clear they intended to go to arbitration, if needed, to get what they wanted.
Then, over the summer, something happened. And it all went away. And it’s not clear why.