YORKTON — A potential strike by more than 14,000 Saskatchewan health-care support workers could place additional pressure on health services in Yorkton and surrounding communities, where workers say years of stalled bargaining have left them with few options.
Members of CUPE 5430, which represents a broad range of health-care workers across the province, are expected to hold a strike vote around Sept. 8 after more than four years without a new collective agreement.
“We don't want to strike but we have been left with no other option,” Bashir Jalloh, president of CUPE Health Care Workers in Saskatchewan, said in a statement. “We feel like we are being taken advantage of, because we are healthcare workers.”
The union represents laboratory technologists, diagnostic imaging staff, continuing care assistants, home-care workers and other support staff working in hospitals, long-term care facilities and community health settings.
Saskatchewan NDP health critic Jacqueline Roy said any job action could affect a range of services in Yorkton, including home care, public health, mental health and addictions programs, laboratory services and diagnostic imaging.
“We know that services ranging from mental health and addictions to home care, lab and x-ray technologies, public health and physician services are going to be impacted,” Roy said. “When those base services aren't there, eventually hospitals begin to feel the brunt of that.”
Roy said the impact would likely be felt throughout the region because Yorkton serves as a health-care hub for many neighbouring communities.
“These facilities help four to five times the population of Yorkton,” she said, noting surrounding rural communities and Indigenous communities rely on services provided in the city.
She said disruptions to laboratory and diagnostic imaging services could create delays in diagnosis and treatment.
“When your x-ray technologists and your lab techs aren't there, it can be very, very hard to get a diagnosis and to get things going at all,” Roy said. “It can make it very hard for the hospital to function whatsoever under certain conditions.”
Roy also pointed to concerns about home care and long-term care services, saying staffing shortages could result in resources being focused only on the highest-priority patients.
“These are also people doing some very basic functions, including home care and long-term care and helping with some of our more vulnerable care communities,” she said.
Public health programs, including immunization services, could also face disruptions.
“Public health would be a big one that will be affected,” Roy said. “Hospitals that are already backed up are just going to be more and more backed up with things that a hospital probably shouldn't have to deal with every day.”
Roy said the labour dispute reflects broader recruitment and retention challenges in Saskatchewan's health-care system, arguing workers continue to leave for provinces offering higher wages.
“Whenever I'm in Yorkton or Melville or any of the small surrounding areas, all I hear is that the recruitment and retention strategies for health-care workers aren't working,” she said. “Their friends are leaving for Alberta or they're leaving for Manitoba because in a lot of cases you see people that have higher entry-level wages there than our top-out wages here.”
She also said some health-care workers are struggling financially despite working in the sector.
“We've seen some of our health-care workers here even visiting the food bank because their wages simply don't meet the bare bones minimum of what they should be,” Roy said.
While a successful strike vote would not automatically trigger a walkout, Roy said it could signal further labour unrest across the health-care sector.
“That would definitely push other unions into a similar situation,” she said. “This would just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what's happening.”
In a statement, Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill said health-care workers play an important role in the system and that negotiations remain ongoing.
He said the Saskatchewan Association of Health Organizations has tabled proposals that include wage increases, retroactive pay and measures aimed at improving service delivery.
Cockrill also pointed to the government's Health Human Resources Action Plan, saying more than 7,500 workers have joined Saskatchewan's health system since 2022 and highlighting recent investments in frontline care positions.
Roy said reaching a negotiated agreement is critical to maintaining services and retaining workers.
“It's very hard to get people to stay in a health-care system when you are constantly having them not make enough money to meet the basic needs of their family,” she said.
