Huron Lodge caretakers land new city jobs

The outsourcing of caretaker work at the city’s Huron Lodge long-term care home has been accomplished with all the displaced workers finding jobs elsewhere in the City of Windsor workforce.

“No one’s out on the street, someone may have lost the job they’re currently doing, but they’ve subsequently picked another job,” executive director of human resources Vincenza Mihalo said of the bumping process that concluded prior to June 5 — the date that multinational company Aramark replaced the city workers with their own employees at Huron Lodge. The move is eventually supposed to save the city $605,000 a year.

Council approved the outsourcing by the slimmest of margins in January, with the stipulation that jobs be found for all the full-time employees. Mihalo said except for one employee who retired, all 14 full-timers picked a position and all nine part-timers picked a position — either vacant jobs or jobs held by people with lower seniority. And people who were displaced by the caretakers subsequently found positions themselves.

“We knew it was going to be difficult and it was not an easy process,” said Mihalo, citing the anxiety and stress workers experience as they change jobs and end up in new jobs. “It’s never a process the employee wants to go through or you want the employees to go through.”

While the bumping process is over, the union president representing caretakers said “whether one wants to consider it a happy ending is a different story.”

Mark Vander Voort of CUPE Local 543 said because of the lost jobs, the 51 part-time caretakers in the corporation have seen their hours cut. Some went from working 30 or 40 hours a week for many years to working just 20 hours.

“It’s quite a struggle for them to have to endure that kind of (income) reduction,” he said.