NBNU president Paula Doucet is hoping that collective agreements with the union’s three bargaining units will finally be in place sometime this fall.
After tentative deals with two bargaining units—nurse supervisors and part III nurses, which includes hospital nurses—were “overwhelmingly rejected” on August 12, the union is re-grouping and consulting with its members to figure out where the issues lie.
The union held meetings last week and is planning a gathering of local presidents in Fredericton on August 31 to “get a pulse and a feel of what the misses and the hits were with our recent tentantive agreement rejection,” says Doucet.
The last collective agreement with the NBNU expired on December 31, 2018.
“We were given a mandate by our members three years ago,” says Doucet. “And as you can appreciate three years of bargaining is a long time and things have changed.” Doucet says the pandemic has also “played havoc on the work life of the registered nurses and nurse practitioners in this province. So we’re just really wanting to hear back again from our members, and to validate and see if the mandate is still very much relevant today as it was three years ago.”
The nursing shortage is exacerbating already difficult working conditions for nurses, as they are asked to work longer hours and larger amounts of overtime.
Doucet says that the lack of a collective agreement for more than two and a half years is part of the reason why nurses aren’t looking at New Brunswick as a possible destination to practice.
“Right now, sadly, we are one of the lowest paid registered nurses in the country,” says Doucet. And in a time when most jurisdictions are recruiting health care workers, that comparatively low salary could be discouraging nurses from locating in New Brunswick.
Recently the Nova Scotia PC Party won a majority government in Nova Scotia after a campaign almost solely focussed on health care, and promising increasing provincial spending to recruit health care workers. Doucet says that threw up a red flag for her. “We need to be very competitive, and if not be the leader in nurses and healthcare in the Atlantic provinces to maintain our workforce and to actually recruit more to it,” she says.
Doucet can’t say quantitatively why NBNU members rejected the deal, but she has theories. “I think what is happening out there is that nurses are frustrated. Nurses are fed up. And they are feeling disrespected by regional health authorities and governments.”
“Right now is like the perfect storm,” says Doucet, of pandemic conditions, reduced staff numbers, and longer hours.
“There is a level of frustration out there that I don’t know what it will take actually to to ease that frustration, apart from a little bit of recognition, respect and being renumerated fairly for the work that nurses do in this province.”
Doucet says the government is aware of the union meeting on August 31, and it’s possible both parties could be back at the bargaining table after that. If not, there are also conciliation dates set for mid-September.
“There’s a lot of possibilities out there,” says Doucet. “The goal is always to reach a tentative agreement at the table, so that is still our goal for all of our negotiating teams right now.”