COLUMN: Carillon Flashback, March 1, 1999 – Nurses’ strike would be difficult to cope with

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This article was published 01/08/2023 (653 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The health care system will struggle badly to cope should nurses across the province take strike action this spring, the South Eastman Health board has been warned.

While legislation is in place to maintain essential services during a strike, the health care system simply does not have the resources to easily make it through an extended strike, board chairman Paul Campbell told board members during their regular April meeting.

Essential health services were maintained during the last strike, in January of 1991, which lasted 31 days, Campbell recalled.

The province-wide council of health board chairmen, however, agrees, the system could survive just three days of a nurses’ strike this year.

“There isn’t the capacity in the system to maintain services for an extended strike. The system could be in trouble very, very quickly.”

Compared to the last strike, there are many fewer nurse managers in the system. Those who remain are already working overtime and extra time, Campbell noted.

Reg Toews, chief executive officer of the regional health authority, noted provincial legislation allows the body to ensure essential services are adequately staffed.

The legislation, however, has not been adequately tested and definitions of what constitutes an essential service would likely be challenged in a labor dispute, Toews said.

This creates a great deal of uncertainty and uneasiness, he added.

The present agreement between the provincial government and the Manitoba Nurses’ Union will expire March 31. Strike action can legally be taken 30 days later.

Contract negotiations are going on; however, “the assumption is there will be some labor unrest,” Toews said.

“Since the negotiations are between the province and the union, the regional health authority is not in charge of this.”

The 1991 nurses’ strike was settled after 31 days,with the nurses accepting an offer that was very close to what the province had offered much earlier in the negotiations.

Carillon editor Peter Dyck, in a March 1, 1991 editorial, complained the nurses’ strike should have been settled much earlier and the end result very much reflected that.

“The fact the nurses accepted a wage offer nearly identical to one their union scornfully rejected three weeks ago raises the question of why the strike lasted as long as it did. The numbers speak for themselves: the two-year package gives nurses an increase of 14 percent over two years, while an offer they turned down contained 20 percent over three years.

“In two years’ time they will likely face a government much more insistent that raises be kept in step with general economic conditions. For their part, nurses may ask themselves whether walking a picket line is worth the trouble.”

With a 1999 strike date deadline looming, Premier Gary Filmon, at a meeting in Steinbach, announced the province had reached an agreement with the nurses’ union, just hours before Steinbach Conservatives chose Jim Penner as their candidate for the next provincial election.