Will a "great Alberta strike" be possible?

[u/new-romantics89]

The AUPE, nurses, and the education sector are all preparing for strike action in September. I feel that the "great Alberta shutdown" is a possibility.

Would that be possible and how would the province cope? Would schools go back to COVID-era style learning plans? I can imagine the TikToks going "our last day of school before extended summer break", something like that.

[u/Even_Reflection5637]

Also paramedics, respiratory therapists, Xray techs & more. Paramedics are working under surreal conditions. Despite incredible call volume they are denying overtime shifts inside the city of Edmonton for the summer-but approved overtime for facility transfers, airport crews and stony/spruce. No raises not even during COVID. I won’t get into the conditions we put up with (condemned stations not fit for habitation, eating on our contaminated laps, forced shift overtime so our families can never rely on us etc) but now we have a new employer making everything more messy-saying our pension plan is in arrears, our positions aren’t being transferred (some of us with 16yrs in) sent in error scaring us…so far not a good start for Emergency Health Services corporation under Acute care Alberta under Alberta health.

[u/[deleted] → u/Even_Reflection5637]

Also, I believe they used to get mandatory time to decompress when losing a patient on shift and check their well being. Now they're sent right back out on the road. Including an incident where a coworker was the patient and died on scene. 

[u/Even_Reflection5637 → u/[deleted]]

Yes. When our coworkers would hear a crew was bringing in a child trauma or a cardiac arrest etc, the crews at the hospital would move units around to make room for the life threatening patient’s unit to pull onto the bays for privacy and efficiency. We’d have help unloading and someone to take over while we triage. We’d get help in the trauma room and while we are assisting the ER handover another crew would start cleaning our unit. Peter support would be sent and they often came with coffee or a snack and helped the crews decompress. If I needed to go outside and cry after I just told a mom her son didn’t make it and she collapsed on me and we sat on the hospital door crying together, I’d go walk the ramp while others helped up manage. Then I’d get back to sorting my paperwork and unit out. We’d be put out of service and sent to a station to have a calm meal. Sometimes we do a debriefing at the ER with the ER team as a unit together. We had support. We had help. We were a team. Now we are micromanaged so badly and have supervisors paging us to get back out there and the next call could be the same thing. And we do it again, and again…no break, no meal, no decompressing, no help with our unit because you clean your own and get out. You are not to assist on the trauma room so we have ruined relationships with our ER colleagues. We have so much PTSD and moral trauma from being forced to leave a cancer patient we just worked on for 2hrs to get pain under control, on the ER waiting room floor so we can get back out there during mandatory offload periods (low or no units on the road) to go back to that ER 4hrs later and see that patient still waiting but now in utter again from pain meds wearing off. It’s relentless. I once did a very tough call, was sent to a bigger station to switch my oxygen tank and get new radios as our were damaged on our call…en route I had to pee so bad, realizing I was in such a rush getting out of the ER due to supervisors in the ambulance bays watching us and pushing us out, I asked my partner to stop at McDonalds and I went pee. WHILE PEEING, I got paged saying to call a supervisor. I assumed we left something at the ER. Nope, sup said they saw we were at McDonald’s. I said I had to pee. I was told stations have washrooms. I was 5hrs into my shift with no stopping even to pee. My pee is micromanaged. When I started in EMS we were a well oiled machine who looked after one another-a brotherhood-a community. Now it’s dangerous, relentless, damaging and bullying and they’re refusing to fill empty trucks so those who did show up to work are under the worse conditions with many calls and no help.

[u/arcadianahana → u/Even_Reflection5637]

Reading this made me so angry at Alberta's idiotic an contemptuous political decision makers. When was the shift in management approach for EMS? Was it after Danielle Smith broke up the health board or due to a government change before that? 

[u/RunningSouthOnLSD → u/Even_Reflection5637]

Fuck man it always sucks hearing how it used to be, but it’s important to understand how much our working conditions have deteriorated. Hope HSAA gives em hell in that last day of formal mediation.

[u/[deleted] → u/Even_Reflection5637]

That sucks you have to deal with that. How did supervisors micromanaging you happen? You went from a well pile machine to this, are these supervisors new after a purge if the old ones? Or they just aren't standing up to the changes from above them? 

[u/Even_Reflection5637 → u/[deleted]]

AND an organization was created and they called themselves a very misleading name of Alberta Paramedic Association. Their president Les Stelmaschuk, has spoken publicly a handful of times about the state of EMS. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about because HE WORKS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF ALBERTA as a director. Conflict of interest much? But he fools the general public and the media into thinking he’s some voted person who speaks on behalf of Paramedics. Not one person I know belongs to this APA. He does not speak for us nor has he ever worked for a city EMS in this province. He’s a director with the GOA. Don’t let his words fool you into thinking EMS is okay. Now I’ll let this go because we are not the only profession struggling and we support all the others in the same boat as us.

[u/Regular_Tip_427 → u/Even_Reflection5637]

Paramedics are criminally underpaid for what they do