A strike by the province's 3,500 ambulance paramedics and dispatchers entered its fifth month yesterday with no end in sight.
And yet ambulance sirens across the province continue to wail and that, say labour relations experts, makes it hard for the paramedics' union to gain any traction.
"The public is not particularly inconvenienced, they're not upset, they're not writing their MLAs demanding action," said Mark Thompson, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business, where he researches industrial relations.
Members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees local 873 have been on strike across sa国际传媒 since April 1, but an essential services order handed down a few weeks later by the Labour Relations Board has kept workers on the job and curtailed the union's ability to take job action.
Workers have been wearing T-shirts that read, "On strike," while ambulances have been emblazoned with stickers bearing the same message.
The union has also launched a public awareness campaign, including newspaper and radio spots, and withheld some administrative tasks.
But the day-to-day work of responding to 9-1-1 calls and transferring patients from one hospital to the next continues.
"If you really need an ambulance, you get one," Thompson said. "What's a non-essential ambulance?"
The essential services order combined with the global recession -- job cuts, wage freezes and shrinking budgets -- doesn't make for an easy time for job action.
"You don't have much leverage with the employer and you don't have a lot of sympathy with the public," Thompson said.
Ken Thornicroft, who teaches labour relations and employment law at the University of Victoria's business school and acts as an arbitrator in labour disputes, agreed the paramedics are in a tough position.
Failing to live up to the essential services order would undermine the union's bargaining position -- particularly if its actions compromised patient safety -- but that might be the only way to put pressure on the government.
And so far, Thornicroft said, union members haven't been willing to take that risk.
"They're really in a difficult spot and that's reflected in the fact that five months later, they don't have a deal and they don't even seem that close to getting a deal," he said. "To some degree, they might be victims of their own conscientiousness."
The union's latest proposal, tabled when the two sides last met formally in June, included a three per cent wage increase the first year and five per cent in each of the next two years.
The starting salary for a full-time paramedic ranges from $52,372 to $69,058, depending on training.
With a very low turnover rate -- less than three per cent in the last year -- it takes about five years to secure a full-time position.
In the meantime, paramedics work part-time, and are paid an hourly starting wage of between $14 and $27, again depending on training. In fact, part-time positions greatly outnumber full-time, at 2,100 part-time to 1,400 full-time jobs. Alberta, by contrast, has almost 2,000 full-timers and just under 1,300 part-timers, with the latter category including casuals and volunteers.
Rick Fraser, a spokesman for one of two paramedics unions in Alberta, said paramedics in Calgary and Edmonton have maintained wage parity with police and firefighters and those who want full-time work can usually find it without much trouble.
He said other jurisdictions would not look to sa国际传媒 as a good model for paramedics. "They lose a lot of quality people because it's difficult to make a career there."
Paramedics who work on-call in remote areas of sa国际传媒 are paid $2 an hour to carry a pager.
They respond to calls from wherever they are in the community, including other jobs, and are not required to be at the station. When they do attend a call, they earn their full hourly rate for a minimum of four hours.
Paramedics on standby wait for calls from the station and earn $10.80 per hour and then their full paramedic rate for a minimum of three hours when they attend a call.
The ambulance service has offered a one-year-contract proposal with a three per cent wage increase for 2009-10, which it said is in the same league as settlements available to other public sector unions. The proposed increase would build on a two per cent wage increase paramedics and dispatchers received in 2008-09.
The union has balked at the proposal.
"That does absolutely nothing to address the state of the ambulance service and is completely unacceptable to paramedics," said B.J. Chute, director of public education for the Ambulance Paramedics of sa国际传媒
According to him, the union sent a letter to the ambulance service last week requesting a return to the bargaining table, but has yet to receive a response.
If such a letter was sent, the chief operating officer of the sa国际传媒 Ambulance Service -- the employer -- said she hasn't seen it yet. "We've not received correspondence that I'm aware of from the union where they've asked for further bargaining dates," Sue Conroy said Thursday.
sa国际传媒 Ambulance has not written the union to request a meeting, she added.
Conroy said the ambulance service would prefer a negotiated settlement over one imposed by an arbitrator.
Chute agreed, but added it hasn't worked so far, so perhaps it's time for arbitration.
"It truly feels for the past five months paramedics have been bargaining with ourselves," he said, adding paramedics would accept whatever decision an arbitrator makes.
But Thompson and Thornicroft both said the government wouldn't likely go for arbitration.
"They don't like turning over the authority to some neutral [body]to spend their money and they don't think they have to because, in the end, they have the clout -- they'll legislate them back to work," Thompson said.
