Home-care crisis will only get worse

Does Premier Doug Ford want to destroy decent-paying jobs for women health-care workers? It looks that way.

One move by the Ford government has been reforms that are seeing home-care corporations running hospital facilities for convalescing patients.

According to the government’s own research, wages for these workers are vastly inferior to those normally paid in a hospital.

At one facility in Toronto, the home-care organization was paying personal support workers (PSWs) a mere $16.50 an hour. That’s below the norm in hospitals, less than the organization paid its PSWs who actually work in home care.

Only after a campaign by CUPE did the hospital take the work back in-house and pay workers accordingly.

That’s one example of how the Ford government is driving down wages for women healthcare workers. But what’s happening has roots in the last Progressive Conservative government back in the 1990s.

After the mass privatization of home care by the Mike Harris government, the only part left with decent working conditions was the Community Care Access Centres (now Home and Community Care Support Services).

Now the plan is to break up these organizations and disperse the work. Earlier this month, the government brought in regulations that allow the care co-ordination normally done by the HCCSSs to be done instead by the for-profit corporations that provide home-care services. The corporations can both provide the service and oversee the provision of the service. It’s a conflict of interest.

Another good question is how the government expects to keep this workforce at work during restructuring. They have refused to provide any assurance that employment or working conditions will remain when the work is transferred to these low-pay outfits.

One change likely to destroy the remnants of not-for-profit home care is the PC plan to bring back competitive bidding for contracts.

Competitive bidding favours lowest cost rather than best or most stable care. The Harris government first introduced it, causing the downward spiral that has so many vulnerable people without care today.

Decades-old not-for-profits were replaced by corporations with no local roots. Hundreds of workers lost their jobs and continuity of care was destroyed. The system was so bad it was suspended for good in 2007. Now, Ford’s government is looking at bringing it back.

It’s not just hourly wages that are the problem. Home-care workers are paid while at a home providing care, not for their full work day.

The sexism is complete: firefighters don’t fight fires all day. But when home-care workers finish a call, they have to go sit in a mall and wait for their next visit — unpaid.

The impact on women healthcare workers and the healthcare system is obvious. Longterm care needs 59,000 more nurses and PSWs over the next few years. That’s above and beyond the normal turnover, which increased because of understaffing and government wage restraint. More will be needed in hospitals and home care. Over the next 30 years, we need to more than double our commitment to health care to deal with a growing and aging population.

That’s not easy with a government that forced health-care workers to take three years of one per cent wage increases when Ontario inflation is running at 6.1 per cent and going up.

We need to build our healthcare system based on fair working conditions that attract staff. Anything else dooms our health-care system to ongoing staffing crises.