Genevieve Vorstenbosch loves her job at the local hospital, but defending her position as an AUPE member to friends who have ties to the oil sector as to why she deserves a raise when their industry has taken a hit can be a no-win situation.
“Why do we have to apologize for being public workers? I love healthcare. Love it. They’ve (UCP) made it sound like we are the reason there’s a problem in this province and oilfield workers are what makes the money and we should just be grateful for what we have. I’ve never seen this mentality before.”
Vorstenbosch was among the AUPE workers participating in an information picket on their own time at the St. Therese Health Centre in St. Paul last Monday. About 30 union members including health care aides, housekeepers, maintenance, lab workers, x-ray techs, mental health staff and unit clerks, took to the street in front of the facility as part of the AUPE’s Fightback campaign.
What Vorstenbosch would like people to know is that she hasn’t had a raise in years, but that’s not even the reason she’s fighting back against Premier Jason Kenney’s budget.
“What they are not noticing, and it’s happening really rapidly, is that he’s taking a shotgun to public services and it’s not just union members looking for a raise . . . it’s our local community’s losing Parent Link, AISH members losing benefits . . . so it’s all of these little things. There’s a whole other story about how these public sector cuts are affecting our community.”
With the UCP budget setting its sights on cutting thousands of full-time jobs in the public sector and rolling back wages, Alberta’s largest union, 95,000 members strong, is taking a stand.
“We are seeing lots of anger among our members and we have to give that anger a place to go,” AUPE Vice-President Mike Dempsey, told the Journal of the Fightback campaign. “We need to make the public aware of the scale of the cuts to public services that are coming out now and moving forward as all the details of the budget are released.”
Dempsey questions how the UCP government justifies handing out $4.7 billion in large-scale tax breaks over the next few years to corporate Alberta. He argues the tax incentive will not create jobs in Alberta’s oil sector pointing to last month’s decision by Encana to move its headquarters south of the border despite a $55 million tax break from the province. Rather he believes the tax break will be made on the backs of the public sector.
“The government is saying we’ve got to find that money we just gave away to business, those tax breaks, from regular Albertans. We are expecting in the first round of cuts up to 16,000 jobs will be lost partly through attrition and partly through layoffs and so on . . . We have our overworked members who haven’t had a raise in three, four, five years being told they’ve got to give some of it back even. It kind of came to a boiler.”
Dempsey charges the UCP is strategically pitting the private sector, particularly oil industry workers, against the public sector in order to sell its budget.
“Their jobs are drying up because of the fall in the price of oil so it’s a separate discussion altogether. The nature of their work has dried up but there are not less people moving to Alberta,” Demsey said, adding, “We have an aging population so the demands on the public sector have grown. How can we cut back on what is a booming business of taking care and looking after the needs of the people in this province?”
