Mobilization against the camouflage of compulsory overtime at Sainte-Justine

Nurses at CHU Sainte-Justine refuse to submit to the on-call system imposed this month, considering that it is all in all compulsory overtime (TSO), but hidden, since scheduled .

The Union of Nursing and Cardiorespiratory Care Professionals of the CHU Sainte-Justine -CSN (SPSIC) is not asking for the abolition in good and due form of these guards, many of its 1700 members fond of their greater predictability compared to the traditional TSO.

Rather, he calls for them to be counted as TSO hours, to avoid the true picture being obscured.

“We want to make sure that the [ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS)] You should know that at the CHU Sainte-Justine, shifts are imposed,” explains the president of the SPSIC, Félix-Olivier Bonneville.

It’s like a freshly painted facade, but it’s full of mold underneath. It looks good, but the pain is there and the structure is in danger.

Félix-Olivier Bonneville, president of the SPSIC of the CHU Sainte-Justine

He cites as an example statements by the former CEO of the CHU Sainte-Justine, Fabrice Brunet, and the Minister of Health and Social Services, Christian Dubé, who affirmed in the fall of 2021 that the TSO did not exist in Sainte-Justine. -Justine, completely failing to consider the imposed guards.

The union representative opposes them with statistics presented to the union last summer which showed that between July 2021 and June 2022, approximately 12,000 hours of work were allocated within the framework of imposed guards. The CHU Sainte-Justine was not able to confirm this figure at the time of publication of these lines.

A certain openness with the employer

For the CHU Sainte-Justine, compulsory call duty and TSO cannot be combined. “On-call duty is a method of work planning included in the local provisions of the applicable collective agreement […] for many years and which makes it possible to reduce the use of the TSO”, he specifies, by email.

The hospital nevertheless took note of the mobilization of the SPSIC and agreed not to impose any call duty for a period of 28 days, from October 9 to November 6. The union and the employer each calculate the number of OSI shifts during this period and will compare the impact of the guards they have assessed.

According to the SPSIC, 111 TSO shifts have been imposed on its members since October 9.

It should be noted that the guards in the operating theater or for the medico-legal kits, which are used to respond to medical emergencies, are not at all targeted by the union mobilization. These are the guards on the floors, used as a means of management to compensate for the lack of personnel, which are no longer carried out.

Moreover, Félix-Olivier Bonneville emphasizes the openness of Sainte-Justine, particularly with regard to the proposals for self-management of the schedules of certain teams to deal with the shortage of labor that is rampant everywhere in the area.

“For several months, the CHU Sainte-Justine has been dealing with exceptional traffic and our employees have been working tirelessly to provide the best care and safe services to our patients. We thank them for their commitment and their solidarity in this particularly demanding context”, declares for its part the hospital center.