New Contract for Personal Attendant Care Employees

Whitby, ON—Employees who provide homecare services for Personal Attendant Care (PAC) have a new collective agreement.

The employees are members of Health Care and Service Workers Union, CLAC Local 304.

The three-year contract includes wage increases of one percent in the third year of the agreement, effectively breaking the industry-wide pattern of lump sum settlements in the homecare sector. Additional improvements include annual retention bonuses and lump sum payments. Despite the modest monetary improvements, the collective agreement maintains industry-leading wages, benefits, pension entitlement, paid vacation, shift cancellation payments, and mileage reimbursements to personal support workers providing homecare in the Durham Region.

“Homecare funding through the Ontario government has been frozen since 2015, which makes bargaining a renewed collective agreement extraordinarily difficult,” says Kevin Gates, CLAC representative. “Despite the obvious funding challenges, our members were not willing to accept another collective agreement with zero percent wage increases and were prepared to move toward strike action to enforce our contract demands.”

Prior to seeking a strike mandate, the bargaining committee offered PAC the opportunity to resolve the contract dispute through voluntary binding arbitration in an effort to avoid a withdrawal of services. The parties agreed to refer the matter to arbitration and a hearing was held on November 26, 2019.