The government wants to devalue nurse clinician specialists, buyers, and clinical sexologists

April 25, 2023

Montréal – While unions are satisfied with some of the agreements reached at the provincial committee on jobs, they are sharply critical of the employer’s bad faith in evaluating several job titles created a number of years ago. Despite an unprecedented labour shortage, the government is trying to depreciate the value of three job titles: nurse clinician specialists, buyers, and clinical sexologists.  

“As we all know, workers are leaving the system in droves right now. And yet, the government is moving ahead with proposals that are intended to reduce evaluation scores for nurse clinician specialists, buyers, and clinical sexologists,” say spokespersons for the FSSS-CSN, APTS, FIQ, FP-CSN, FSQ-CSQ, CUPE Québec-FTQ and SQEES-FTQ. “What makes the government’s bad faith glaringly obvious is that it’s been trying to get the committee to reduce an evaluation that it had submitted itself in 2015.”

The unions’ collective agreements state that when a new job title is created, it must be added to the list of job titles with a temporary ranking that is maintained until the job title’s evaluation is determined by joint agreement. These joint agreements are extremely important since rankings determine the salary scale of job titles on the basis of the responsibilities involved. When there is no joint agreement, an arbitration decision must be handed down.

The sexologist, clinical sexologist, buyer, executive assistant and nurse clinician specialist job titles were analyzed by the provincial committee over the past few months and an agreement was reached on the evaluation of the executive assistant and sexologist job titles, although there is no agreement yet as to how pay adjustments will be calculated. As for the buyer, clinical sexologist and nurse clinician specialist job titles, it is now understood that they will go to arbitration.

“Once again, job titles in which women predominate are getting the short end of the stick,” said the unions. “That is completely unacceptable. People working for our public system need to be valued more, not less.”

Source: FP-CSN, APTS, FIQ, FSSS-CSN, FSQ-CSQ, CUPE Québec, SQEES