(Halifax) – The chance of a negotiated end to contract talks for some 3,000 Nova Scotia hospital workers has been dashed.
Talks between CUPE and the employer group for 35 hospitals across the province, all outside of the Halifax area, have broken off after the hospitals refused to bargain on over 40 outstanding issues.
CUPE Health Care Co-ordinator Wayne Thomas says, “As we had feared, the hospital employers have chosen instead to roll the dice with the Hamm government’s so-called Final Offer Selection process.”
Final Offer Selection – or FOS – is a form of binding arbitration where both the union and the employer put a package before a selector, who then chooses one or the other.
Says Thomas, “What is most disturbing is that items which they freely negotiated with both the Nova Scotia Nurses’ Union and NSGEU, they are refusing to give to us. Contract provisions that exist in both those agreements are being denied to CUPE hospital workers. CUPE hospital workers will be outraged.”
“As a result of our being unable to agree on a final package, literally everything that had been agreed to is now off the table and we are back to square one,” says Thomas.
CUPE will be meeting with its lawyers next week to determine where it will go from here.
For information:
Wayne Thomas John McCracken
CUPE Health Care Co-ordinator CUPE Communications Representative
(902) 759-1057 (Cell) (902) 455-4180 (o)
(902) 485-4719 (h) (902) 222-8457 (Cell)