By John Guise
According to a recent poll, the majority of unionized workers say they will suffer from burnout unless their unions deal with added workload problems.
A national survey done by Ekos Research Associates for the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) polled 1,213 unionized workers in both the private and public sectors.
The survey found that 71 per cent of the union members felt workload problems should be a priority for their unions.
Robert Fox, director of communications with CUPE, says workload stress is more prominent among workers in the public sector.
“In the public sector there have been cutbacks in staffing, because the budget has been cut. So people are expected to do more work and they just can’t keep it up,” he says.
Fox also says an increase in the demand for public sector services has added pressure on its employees to work harder.
Rachel Besharah, a teacher with Centretown Co-op Parents’ Day Care and president of CUPE Local 2204, Childcare Workers of Eastern Ontario, says workload is a big issue for child-care workers.
“We have ratios (the numbers of care workers to children, mandated by the provincial government) that we have to maintain so that if we are short staffed, then some people end up working through their breaks or working through their lunch hours or having to stay late,” she says.
Besharah says the extra work can have an effect on the safety of the day care.
“If I give up my break and spend my afternoon supervising children overly tired, that’s when accidents can happen,” she says.
The same problems can be seen in the high school system, says Pat Holloway, a department head at the Adult High School and member of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation.
He says the new government curriculum has made it harder for teachers to spend time with their students since a class has been added to each teacher’s course load.
“I can’t meet my students when they can meet me and I think education has suffered because of it,” he says.
Barb Stewart, a training co-ordinator at the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, says an example of workload pressure can be seen within the federal government.
In order to deal with pay equity compensation, management hired more people to deal with the added stress.
However, Stewart says this actually increased workload for trained staff because it took the new employees an unexpected amount of time to become familiar with the job.
Holloway says teachers are cracking under the pressure, with more of them taking sick leave or going on long-term disability than ever before.
While teachers say that their workload is too heavy, the Ministry of Education expects them to spend the same amount of hours in the classroom as other teachers across the country, says Dave Ross, a ministry spokesperson.
Unionized workers say they believe their unions are properly addressing the issue.
However, unions such as CUPE, and the Ontario Secondary School Teacher’s Federation say they plan to continue to bring the issue to the bargaining table.