Pay hikes must be permanent
It’s taken a pandemic for the Ontario government to finally grasp the vital role that personal support workers play in our health-care system, acknowledge how overworked they are and do something about how poorly they’re paid.
They received a $4-an-hour boost as part of the province’s broad front-line pandemic pay program that ended in August. And just last week the government announced it would, once again, “temporarily enhance wages” for personal support workers.
This time, those working in long-term-care homes will get a $3-an-hour increase while those working in hospitals, where wages and benefits are higher to begin with, will get another $2 an hour until March 2021.
“I’ve always said they were overworked and underpaid,” Premier Doug Ford said as he announced the $461-million plan on Thursday.
“We need to make sure that when our loved ones need care there is a PSW there to support them and that means retaining our PSWs and getting more into the system,” Ford added.
He’s right. So why is this second round of pay increases not permanent?
Being overworked and underpaid is not a temporary condition brought on by COVID-19. All the pandemic has done is make that condition impossible to ignore.
Now, through the tragic outbreaks in long-term-care homes and the COVID-19 deaths of more than 1,900 residents, the public has a very clear understanding of the connection between the pay and working conditions of personal support workers and the welfare of our vulnerable seniors.
Personal support workers were underpaid long before COVID-19 came along and if these pay hikes disappear from cheques six months from now, as they are scheduled to do, they’ll be badly underpaid yet again.
And better pay for workers is just part of what’s needed to ensure long-term-care homes can provide the level of care that residents and their families should be able to expect.
Personal support workers are run off their feet and unable to spend enough time properly providing vital hands-on care to residents. And they are often held to part-time hours, forcing them to cobble together jobs at multiple homes just to make a living. All this needs to change.
The use of part-time personal support workers and temp agency staff in long-term-care homes served to undermine the precautions that could have kept seniors in those homes safer from COVID-19. But even in regular times it does nothing good for resident care.
The reason families were so desperate to get back into care homes when they were locked down to control the spread of the virus is because they know just how important the care they provide, from feeding to cleaning, is to fill in the gaps in understaffed homes.
Allowing them to keep doing that as the province heads into the second wave is why Ontario basically has a new healthcare designation: “essential caregiver.” That used to be someone visiting a loved one, but now we’re actually recognizing it for what it is: volunteer labour that the system can’t do without.
The pay increase for PSWs announced last week is long overdue but, now that it’s here, let’s at least make it permanent. And now that the premier has repeatedly admitted that these workers are “overworked,” shouldn’t the government do something about that?
That would mean setting — and funding — daily care standards so the important work of caring for our vulnerable seniors can be done well and safely for everyone.
The pandemic has shown us all how essential much lowpaid, undervalued work really is. Having accepted that better pay and working conditions are necessary in a crisis, surely we can’t go back to pretending they’re not needed all the time.
Being overworked and underpaid is not a temporary condition