Hundreds rally against wage freeze at PRHC

168 will have wages frozen for three years

At least 200 people showed up for a rally outside Peterborough Regional Health Centre (PRHC) at lunchtime on Tuesday, organizers said, to protest impending wage freezes for clerical workers.

The protesters rallied while chanting, “Clerks do the work!”

Smokey Thomas, the provincial president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union was there. OPSEU Local 345 represents the PRHC workers.

The wage freezes will affect 244 of the hospital’s 247 clerical workers — and some will not get a raise for as long as eight years, he said.

“It’s really over the top,” Thomas said in an interview following the rally, adding that the union plans to “shame” the hospital into not implementing the re-evaluations.

“We’ve got to stop it here, or this (wage freezes) will spread to other hospitals.”

But hospital spokeswoman Michelene Ough has told The Examiner that the jobs hadn’t been re-evaluated in years — and that it was done “objectively.”

She also wrote that of the 247 jobs re-evaluated:

• 33 will not see their wages change.

• 168 will have their wages frozen for three years.

• 46 will have their pay frozen beyond 2022.

Yet Thomas says many of the clerical workers have already filed grievances on grounds of improper job reclassification.

“We have dozens and dozens of personal grievances in — a couple of hundred,” he said.

The workers are exercising their right to grieve “in droves,” Thomas said.

“It tells the hospital: Uh-oh,” he said. “They (grievances) just keep coming and coming.”

The union is checking with the Ontario Labour Relations Board to see whether the job reclassifications amount to bad faith bargaining — if so, he said, the union would file a grievance of its own, he said.

When asked Tuesday how the hospital feels about these grievances, Ough replied by email that it’s between PRHC and its workers.

“The hospital and the union have an established process between them in place for grievances,” she wrote. “The hospital intends to respect this process as it is described in the collective agreement.”

Thomas noted that the rally was attended by OPSEU executive board members from across the province, as well as members of other unions and the affected clerical workers themselves.

Thomas said he was “very, very impressed” with the clerical workers: “They’re genuinely nice people who don’t deserve to be treated this way.”

The vast majority of them are women, he pointed out. Sometimes employers will mistreat women workers, he said, because they expect “women will say nothing.”

“Guess what? They do (speak up),” Thomas said.

Yet Ough wrote to The Examiner recently that PRHC is a known employer for women: she wrote that 88 per cent of all workers at the hospital are women.

“This includes a senior leadership team that is 70 per cent female and a board of directors that is composed of 60 per cent women,” she wrote.

That doesn’t mean much to Thomas, who maintains PRHC is mistreating women workers in this instance. “And we’re not going to let this go.”