Mayor Kristal Chopp taking a grievance complaint from the Ontario Nurses Association and CUPE public.
On Tuesday, Mayor Chopp moved a closed session item into public saying she wanted to make the discussions as transparent as possible, especially considering recent public protests which she says has been only giving half of the story.
The main issues surrounding the two grievances were about compensation and overtime.
One of the issues with ONA is they changed staff hours to respond to the pandemic from a 5 day a week 7 hours per day schedule to 4 days a week at 10 hours per day.
They were paid 10 hours of overtime, as they went from 70 hours to 80 hours every two weeks, but they feel they should be getting 24 hours of overtime as they went from 7 hours to 10.
They feel those hours daily should count as overtime, something Mayor Chopp disagrees with.
Another ongoing situation with ONA is, according to Chopp and the document published at council, ONA has taken issue with Norfolk’s plans for Registered Nurse Practitioners.
Upper governments had given the Health Unit funding to hire nurses for various roles but according to Chopp, ONA seems unwilling to let RNP’s do much of anything in the county.
For example, undertaking daily wellness check phone calls being performed by non-nursing staff, with the ability to transfer the call to a nursing staff member if an issue is detected.
When it comes to CUPE, it is regarding two grievances surrounding the bylaw team.
Their agreement is to work Monday to Friday but the staff was asked to move their schedule around to include Saturday and Sunday shifts as part of that rotation.
The union, according to Chopp and the memo to council, believes they should be paid 1.5X the hourly wage for Saturday and double time on Sunday for any overtime they worked during those specific days.
This agreement did take a few weeks to agree to and some weekend premiums were paid.
The belief is that there could be a potential cost of $300,000 when all is said and done.
For ONA, the discussion is still ongoing.
This issue is also being grieved in other jurisdictions and the County says they are awaiting the other Arbitration rulings.
We did reach out to ONA but they were unable to comment back at this time.
