What the Situation of Personal Support Workers Is Telling Us
- Rolf Gerstenberger,
Co-chair, Hamilton Health Coalition and former President
of
United Steelworkers Local 1005 -
USW Local 1005 has been holding weekly meetings
every Thursday since 2003 to discuss matters of importance to the
workers. At our Thursday meeting on February 13 we had a lively
discussion on the situation facing personal support workers (PSWs) in
Ontario and what their plight is telling us.
Local 1005
President Gary Howe asked me to report on the situation, which is well
documented in the study that was commissioned from the Ontario Health
Coalition by Unifor.[1]
The Coalition did a tour of various cities, including Hamilton, and
held press conferences around the province to
popularize the results.
At the Thursday meeting we dealt with some of the
issues raised in that study and at the press conference held in
Hamilton on February 10. Two weeks earlier at our meeting we also
addressed the situation and many workers spoke of their own experiences
of trying to put someone into long term care, the struggle it entailed
and the many
problems they had to deal with once they were there.
Right now, about 80,000 people are in long term
care in Ontario with 30,000 people on waiting lists, which can result
in a delay of five years or more. Long term care is residential care in a
home for those who can no longer function on their own due to medical
conditions that require assistance. In the 2018 Ontario general
election, the parties
promised to create more long term care homes. Doug Ford himself
committed to building homes for 15,000 people within five years.
Whether it happens or not, the problem is that the system does not have
enough personal support workers to take care of the 80,000 people
already in care. According to the report, even if a seniors' home is
staffed
according to the current rules, the homes are short-staffed because no
one is available to replace staff when sick, on holidays or on days off.
 Staff
have to run from one room to the next to try
to bathe people, maintain them, and the situation just snowballs. This
is bad enough in terms of the patients, but then personal support
workers begin to be abused from all sides because of the situation.
They are forced to work double shifts. They have no days off. They do
not know their
schedules ahead of time. Many are part-time workers juggling two
long-term care jobs and having to balance schedules, disrupting their
lives.
Listening to what these personal support workers in long term care
homes
say about their working conditions, they are a nightmare.
We steelworkers recalled that in our industry it
took a long fight just to achieve regular schedules. If you have no
protection of regular shifts, the company abuses you. Without this
protection, you do not know beforehand what shift you are working or
your days off, causing havoc in your life. We fought for years to have
our schedules set, to
know our work schedule in advance. And if the company violates the
schedule, a penalty exists such as paying time-and-a-half, and other
measures to enforce the rule.
The other sector with a huge problem is home care.
This is where hospitals say they are overcrowded, blaming those they
call "bed blockers" who do not need hospital care and should be in
long-term care but are stuck in the hospital because no long-term care
beds
are available. The "solution" is that while the government
promises to eventually build more long-term care homes, they want more people to go
into home care, whether it is suitable for them or not. The authorities
blame the people for overcrowding the hospitals and use this excuse as
justification for putting vulnerable people and the workers who look
after them into unacceptable conditions.
Home care is said to be the cheapest because you
are in your own home, but require some care, and personal
support workers are sent to take care of you at home. That is what is
being said, but of course it is cheaply done on the backs of workers
and those needing care. Wages are lower for home care workers, with
many of
them barely making minimum wage. Their travel time is not paid. They
have to use their own vehicles. They are on call, running from one home
to the next with no support.
The report puts forward a number of demands to
address the crisis in long-term care. One of them is to guarantee four
hours of care per day for the patients. That means four hours in the
course of a day, time for a bath and time to deal with medical
problems, where personal support workers and nurses can effectively
provide four hours of
care a day. That is one of the goals they are raising to change the
situation for the better. Currently it is nowhere near that level.
We also discussed at our meeting an article in the
local paper, which explains that hospitals do not receive proper
funding for medical equipment. They are forced to fundraise, do
lotteries and beg for charity through donations and contributions from
philanthropists. Hospital equipment is not covered by government
funding. I said that when
the army needs jets or tanks, then they should have a bake sale or a
lottery and raise money from people who want to support the military.
How can hospitals or any modern enterprise be run like that?
A year or two ago a petition was circulated in Ontario
asking who supports a cut in funding for hospitals. Of course 99.99 per
cent of the people said No!,
they do not want to cut funding for hospitals yet that is exactly what
is being done. When these parties get into Parliament or Queen's Park
all of the sudden they find all kinds of excuses to cut funding for
health care and other social programs, such as Ford is doing to
education. The Ontario Liberals, before the Ford government came to
power, froze hospital funding for 10 years, which is actually a major
cut because of the combined factors of an aging population, increased
needs, greater population and price inflation.
Cuts to health care funding are the demand of an
important section of the financial oligarchy and that is what rules in
parliament and legislatures. Besides, the people who are in power in
the legislature figure that they are going to be OK. They have money,
they have connections, they will not go into these long-term care
homes, which lack
resources and workers. They are making decisions that impose conditions
on others that they themselves will not experience.
When discussing what the situation of personal
support workers is telling us, we pointed out at our meeting that people
are grappling with why something as important and basic as health care,
which is such a priority for the people, is not dealt with seriously by
those in power in the parliament and legislatures. They do precisely
the opposite
of what people want, which shows that the people are not empowered and
that the lack of empowerment is the fundamental problem facing society.
The present political system blocks the people from solving the
problems they and society face. What modern political forms are
necessary to turn the situation around to empower the people
politically? That is a problem worth taking up as a priority as it lies
at the root of all other problems.
Note
1. Caring
in Crisis: Ontario's Long-Term Care PSW Shortage - Report &
recommendations from the front lines across Ontario - Commissioned from
the Ontario Health Coalition by Unifor - January 2020
This article was published in
Number 8 - February 27, 2020
Article Link:
What the Situation of Personal Support Workers Is Telling Us - Rolf Gerstenberger,
C
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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