Expect picket lines next Wednesday, N.L. nurses say

Nurses in Newfoundland and Labrador will be in a full strike by next Wednesday, after concluding that the latest move by health authorities amounts to a lockout.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Nurses' Union announced this week it would wage an "overtime strike," by refusing to accept overtime shifts at hospitals and nursing homes.

But on Thursday, the province's health authorities informed the union they would be invoking the essential services provisions of the collective agreement.

Union president Debbie Forward said the letters do not say it explicitly, but the authorities — with the backing of the Newfoundland and Labrador government — are making a provocative move.

"They are locking nurses out … I mean that's it here, folks," Forward told reporters Thursday.

"We've said we'd go to work, they're telling us to stay home. [So] there will be a full strike 7:30 Wednesday morning."

The union has maintained for months that the health-care system is being run on overtime, because of hundreds of unfilled positions across the system.

But Health Minister Ross Wiseman, speaking with reporters on the steps of Confederation Building in St. John's, insisted that invoking essential service agreements with the union is not a lockout.

"We can't afford to leave our patients vulnerable," Wiseman said.

"We had the medical advisory committee at Eastern Health telling us that an overtime strike leaves us in an very untenable position, providing no guarantee that there's going to be any patient safety."

18,000 hours of OT in May 2008

In a conventional strike, almost half of the more than 5,000 members of the union would stay on the job, to ensure emergency and intensive-care units operate properly.

But no such provisions had ever been negotiated for an overtime boycott, which would leave authorities scrambling to provide services across the system.

Data obtained by CBC News through access to information legislation shows that Eastern Health alone paid more than 18,000 overtime hours of nursing work in May 2008.

The dispute currently focuses on two government demands, as most money issues have been settled.

In return for meeting wage demands and raising bottom and top pay scales, key nurses' demands for recruitment and retention issues, the government wants the nurses to accept contract provisions that the union finds offensive.

In one, the governments wants a market adjustment clause, which would allow employers to pay a newly hired nurse more than his or her peers in the same job, as long as the position has been deemed hard to fill.

In the second, a nurse would lose his or her job two years after being declared permanently disabled.

The union has called for binding arbitration, but the government has rejected that out of hand.