Tomorrow home care workers begin fully participating in the Healthcare Employee Benefit Plans, HEBP. The benefits offered through HEBP are a significant improvement over those previously offered to home care workers, and CUPE is confident this change will help with retention and recruitment at this critical time for home care in Manitoba.

Starting October 1, 2025, home care workers will be eligible to participate in the following HEBP benefits:

  1. Health Employees’ Pension Plan – the defined benefit pension plan offered to most public health care employees in Manitoba.
  2. Disability and Rehabilitation Plan – a long-term disability plan.
  3. Extended Health Care Benefits Plan – includes dental, prescription drugs, optical and other standard extended health benefits.
  4. Health Spending Account retroactive to January 1, 2025.
  5. Life Insurance Plan

“For a long time home care workers were overlooked by their employers, and by their governments,” said Gina McKay, president of CUPE Manitoba. “It took all of us pulling in the same coordinated direction to be able to bring these important advancements forward for these workers.”

Home care workers joined CUPE in 2019, which led to the negotiation of benefits through collective bargaining. However, under the previous PC government, progress was slow on implementation.

“Once government changed, we saw a real shift in priorities,” said Holly Chaperon, president of
CUPE 4270. “Instead of having to fight government to get what we had bargained, we had a partner.”

Prior to the changes, home care workers did not receive fully paid sick days, traditional workplace benefits, or a pension.

“This is going to make a massive improvement in recruiting and retaining home care workers,” said Margaret Schroeder, president of CUPE 204. “Before today, we had workers coming in through home care and then moving elsewhere because the compensation package just wasn’t measuring up.”

These improvements build on gains made in the last round of bargaining, which included:

  1. a major mileage increase,
  2. the elimination of unpaid work time,
  3. paid sick days, and
  4. the standardization of wages with health care aides between 2019 and 2022 leading to significant wage increases for home care workers.

“Home care workers are now being treated as respected members of the health care team,” said
Christine Gulliford, president of CUPE 8600. “They fought hard for it, and they earned it.”