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ATHABASCA/BARRHEAD/WESTLOCK - At least 15 employees working in laundry and linen services at health care centres within Athabasca, Barrhead and Westlock will lose jobs as Alberta Health Services’ (AHS) transitions those services to a single contractor, K-Bro Systems
That’s at least according to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE), which represents workers in laundry and linen services.
More specifically, AUPE indicated that six workers in Athabasca, five workers in Barrhead and four in Westlock will “lose their jobs because of this privatization,” according to a spokesperson.
“They’re not big-paying jobs, but they’re steady jobs and they have benefits. But now they’re just going to be taken out of your community and it’s going to hurt small business in your community,” said AUPE vice president Kevin Barry.
On July 26, AHS put out a news release stating that the remaining laundry and linen services within AHS will be taken over by K-Bro Systems.
The transition will begin in the rural Calgary zone in September, followed by the South Zone, the Central Zone and the North Zone (which encompasses Athabasca, Barrhead and Westlock).
The transition will take approximately 34 weeks to complete and AHS expects K-Bro to be providing linen services provincewide by April 1, 2022.
It’s worth noting that K-Bro Linen Systems already provides linen services for urban health care centres in Calgary, Edmonton, Hinton and Edson, which constitutes roughly two-thirds of the linen services throughout Alberta.
According to the release, this transition will affect approximately 334 full-time, part-time and casual employees throughout Alberta, but “AHS is committed to working with them and their union throughout this process to explore potential options in accordance with their collective agreement.”
However, Barry said the workers being affected are likely just going to be losing their jobs without receiving new ones.
“(AHS is) saying they’re going to find them jobs, but they have perfectly good jobs right now. Why would they be ripping them away from their jobs and then saying they’re going to find them something elsewhere?” Barry said.
He suggested that something similar occurred in Saskatchewan when the provincial government privatized laundry services in 2013.
The Saskatchewan government claimed this move would save $100 million, he noted, but according to a 2016 analysis by the Regina Leader-Post, the amount was closer to $17 million. And that’s without factoring in the impact of jobs being lost in communities like Prince Albert.
“The same thing’s going to happen in rural Alberta,” Barry said.
Besides the impact of losing local jobs, Barry suggested this transition will likely affect services locally, using the example of a truck carrying laundry that can’t make it out from Barrhead due to adverse weather.
AHS stated in its release that trying to maintain existing in-house services would necessitate $38 million in upgrades to ensure both the safety and quality of services.
Alternatively, AHS would need to invest more than $100 million to build new modern linen systems across the province.
However, Barry said that the health care system requires investment, and if that requires spending money, so be it.
“It’s about investing in Albertans and making sure that they have the services they need, especially in the rural communities because they don’t have access to a lot of these services. And the little bit they do, they’re going to chip away at it.”
