Nearly four dozen Interior Health (IH) employees who were employed as laundry workers at Royal Inland Hospital and Kelowna General Hospital worked their final shifts last week, after IH decided to contract out their jobs in March 2016.
Hospital laundry services in Nelson, Penticton, and Vernon—as well as supporting jobs in Cranbrook and Trail—are also affected by the IH decision, which has resulted in more than 100 workers being laid off. Laundry services in six smaller centres—Ashcroft, Lillooet, Princeton, 100 Mile House, Williams Lake, and Golden—will remain in-house.
In March last year IH announced that it had awarded a 20-year contract worth an estimated $266 million to the private corporation Ecotex Linen Services Inc. The Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU) led an extensive fight-back campaign, and a petition containing 13,000 signatures was tabled in the legislature, to no avail.
Interior Health declared that the HEU workers were running a high-quality, efficient service, but cited capital costs to upgrade or replace equipment over the next 25 years as the reason behind the privatization.
At the time of their layoffs, most of the employees were earning an hourly wage of between $18.68 and $21.26 an hour. Ecotex is advertising a starting wage of $11.50 an hour for its hospital laundry jobs. After bumping, retraining, and posting into new positions, 34 of the former workers will still be unemployed.
“The privatization policies of the BC Liberals continue to wreak havoc on families, communities, and public services,” says HEU secretary-business manager Jennifer Whiteside. “The sooner we can turn the page on these failed policies, the better.”