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Health care workers stage pre-Xmas picket GREGGCHAMBERLAIN gregg.chamberlain@eap.on.ca would take over the protest.
“These Red Cross homecare workers do not want to be on strike,” said Vicki Brenner, the union representative on site at the picket. “They would rather be serving their clients.” The union and Red Cross Care Partners (RCCP) have been in contract talks since spring. The workers have been without a current contract since April and union has been in a legal strike position for several weeks. As extreme cold conditions sweep through Eastern Ontario and the daytime temperatures plunge down to between minus 10 and minus 20, with or without the wind chill factor, the labour dispute be- tween the union and the RCCP shows no sign of settling before Christmas. The contract dispute concerns just the 4500 SEIU members in Ontario. In Eastern Ontario those numbers include 771 person- al healthcare workers dealing with clients, at home, or in some health care facilities from Cornwall up north and west through- out the Ottawa River Valley to Ottawa, Rockland, Carleton Place, and Kemptville, and south and east to Kingston, Brockville, Peterborough, the Quinte area, and Hast- ings and Prince Edward County. The union’s main demand is for the RCCP to provide either company cars or a realis- tic vehicle maintenance allowance to its healthcare workers who have to use their own cars to go see their clients. They receive a gas mileage allowance but the union says it is not enough to cover the gas used for driving around in rural areas. Also the union wants the paid-wages por- tion of the contract revised so that health- care workers are also paid from the mo- ment they leave to go see a client. Right now they are paid only for the actual time they spend with a client, not for the travel time involved in going from client to client during a work day. A memorandum of agreement (MoA) was reached between negotiators for both sides in the dispute. The MoA included an 11-cent per hour wage increase to a $15 an hour maximum. But the agreement was re- jected in a vote earlier this month by union membership. The union has called on Premier Kathleen Wynne to intervene in the situation. OTTAWA | Anyone considering buying property in the City of Ottawa will have a better idea where not to build soon. The South Nation Conservation Authority (SNC) is working on a five-year plan for the City of Ottawa to update the municipality’s flood-risk maps of the area. SNC staff are surveying the Greys Creek, McCooye Creek, and the Cassidy Municipal Drain area in the Osgoode Ward right now to assess existing and future development pressures involving streams and other wa- ter courses in those locations. Survey de- tails include land elevation changes, bridge measurements, and reviewing past flood damages to help create a computer model that will calculate waterflow during floods. The system will identify areas prone to flood and erosion risks. ŏ) ,/ŏ00 3 ŏ ý++ ŏ.%/'/
ROCKLAND | Two weeks before Christ- mas as the temperature dropped to eight below half a dozen health care workers stood outside on the curb of Laurier Street in Rockland, asking passing motorists to honk as a sign of support. They are members of Local 1 of the SEIU Healthcare, the country’s largest healthcare union, and they took to the street on a cold mid-December morning outside a subsi- dized housing facility in Rockland as part of a province-wide strike in Ontario that be- gan today against Red Cross Care Partners. Later in the day, the next shift of picketers
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