Employee describes unsustainable workloads, lack of resources, and low morale
April Leblanc is a case manager with the Workplace Safety & Insurance Board (WSIB) and she is stressed out by her job. "We have high pressure to produce high volumes at levels that are not sustainable. Essentially, we don't have enough resources to handle the amount of caseload that we have,” says Leblanc, who is also a union representative.
WSIB workers voted 97.3 percent in favour of granting their union a strike mandate as it negotiates a new contract. The deadline for negotiations is Monday May 29 at 12:01a.m.
Harry Goslin is the president of the Ontario Compensation Employees Union and the local 1750 president for the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Goslin says Bill 124, brought into Ontario by Premier Doug Ford’s government in 2019, was a setback for worker wages that needs to be addressed.
“It's a number of issues that have been outstanding and truncated by Bill 124…the unfair, unconstitutional legislation that suppressed wages…so we're looking to make up for lost time.”
Bill 124 capped wage increases for public sector employees at one per cent annually for three years, but was resisted by unions, and was ultimately struck down by the Ontario Superior Court. The Ford government is appealing that decision.
While inflation and wage increases are one of the issues, Leblanc is also focused on improving working conditions so that she and her colleagues can better serve Ontario workers who have suffered a workplace injury. "The work we do drastically impacts injured workers' lives, and they deserve our best.”
“You're ending your day worried and stressed about what you didn't get done,” explains Leblanc, “and we really want to help the people we serve, and it really doesn't feel good if you can't get to enough of them in a day.”
Leblanc says the “unsustainable” workload combined with the feelings of failure has caused talented people to leave the WSIB because “they feel like they don't have the necessary support from the organization to do the job."
Goslin says there are about 700 employees currently going through the grievances process, calling it a “systemic problem in the organization for a number of years.” He says they are trying to get more resources to mitigate the workload impact during this round of negotiations.
Another major issue at play, according to Goslin and Leblanc, is time off. “They're trying to remove some of the accrual, which would amount to a reduction in the overall compensation,” says Goslin. But Leblanc says simply even trying to use the amount of time off that is available to workers is a challenge.
“People will actually not take time off because they know when they come back, they're just going to have more work and going to be more stressed because the load is piled even higher," says Leblanc.
Goslin is hopeful WSIB will address these concerns, but says they are prepared to engage in job action if it comes to that.
“One of our goals is to mitigate any of those negative impacts to injured workers in particular, we'd still be prioritizing making decisions to allow claims, to get those claims processed, and get them access to the health care they need.”
But Goslin says there could be slowdowns to some other services. “If we ended up on a full work stoppage, we talked about processes to try and mitigate some of the impacts with rotating job action, again, to try and minimize the impacts to injured workers.”
Canadian Occupational Safety reached out to WSIB for comment, and it responded with a short statement saying, “we’re at the table and don’t have anything to add.”
A mediator from the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development is now involved at the bargaining table. Negotiations are expected to take place throughout the month.
