Commentary

Manitoba's Health Care Workers Continue to Shoulder the Burden of the Crisis

Manitoba, like the rest of Canada, is experiencing a crisis in health care. The main causes of this crisis are: the withdrawal of billions of dollars in federal health care spending in order to pay down the debt; the rapidly rising cost of pharmaceuticals; and the recruiting of Canadian doctors and nurses to work in the United States, which appears to be incapable of training enough of its own.

After a decade of government cutbacks in health care spending, coupled with wage freezes and rollbacks, some increases in health care spending have been implemented. Doctors have emerged from this period with substantially increased salaries and nurses recently received a 20 percent raise. However, the support workers have had to fight just to restore their wage levels of the early 1990s. The average wage of health care support workers is approximately $13.00 per hour, with many working for little more than minimum wage, despite the fact that their work is essential to the proper functioning of a modern health care system.

The situation of the health care support workers is further complicated by the fact that they are represented by numerous unions. The government has taken advantage of this disunity to pit one group of workers against another, settling with one group and then forcing others to accept the same offer. To date, any measures that the unions have taken to counteract this bargaining strategy of the government have failed.

The Doer government came to power on the promise to put an end to "hallway medicine" in Manitoba. It listed health care as its main priority. The previous Filmon government maintained a policy of inadequate funding to health care infrastructure combined with cutbacks and wage freezes for Manitoba health care workers. While the Doer government has increased some of the infrastructure spending, in its first dealings with health care workers it has continued the policy of the Filmon government of shifting the health care crisis onto the backs of these workers. It has pitted worker against worker in the various hospitals and care facilities and between the city and rural areas, in order to impose on these workers the minimum conditions possible at the present time. The Doer government also attempted to turn the public against the health care workers by suggesting that meeting their demands would force cutbacks in health care provision as there was only so much money to go around.

Despite all the announced intentions of the NDP government to fix health care, to preserve and strengthen it, nothing fundamental has changed. The claim of the government that there are only so many health care dollars available, while it seems to have no problem finding money to bail out capitalists like Motor Coach Industries or to fund a new arena, indicates that its main priority is the same as the previous government, to ensure the profits of the capitalists, while the needs of the people for adequate health care and the need of health care workers for a decent livelihood are secondary.