July 6 news release,<\/a> the union said its members are facing severe pushback for participating. Nurses report being threatened with discipline, warned that their professional licences could be at risk, and pressured to perform non-nursing duties or work unauthorized overtime.<\/p>\n“We’re hearing from a concerning number of nurses who simply want to exercise their legal right to participate in job action, yet they’re being met with intimidation, threats and misinformation,” said BCNU President Adriane Gear. “No nurse should be made to feel afraid for standing up for safer workplaces, better retention and a stronger public health-care system.”<\/p>\n
Despite the escalation at major hospitals, the union confirmed that essential service levels will remain in place to protect patient safety.<\/p>\n
“Nurses do not want to see patient care impacted,” said Gear. “Every decision we’ve made throughout this process has been guided by our commitment to protecting patients and maintaining essential services. But when employers refuse to respect nurses’ legal rights and instead choose confrontation over meaningful engagement, they leave us with no choice but to increase the pressure.”<\/p>\n
The job action follows a historic strike vote in which 98.2 per cent of the 50,850 participating nurses voted in favour of action. Members subsequently rejected a tentative agreement by 67 per cent, signalling that the government\u2019s mandate failed to address core concerns such as meaningful wage improvements, workplace safety, retention and the ongoing nursing shortage.<\/p>\n
The union is now calling on the provincial government to intervene directly.<\/p>\n
“The provincial government must come back to the table with an offer that respects nurses and recognizes their value in our health-care system,” says BCNU CEO Jim Gould. “This government is not going to solve the nursing shortage without making serious improvements to nurses’ working conditions.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"British Columbia\u2019s nurses will expand their ongoing job action by establishing picket lines at Surrey Memorial Hospital and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,84,5432,37024,1571,37023,2371,281881,32146,87674,142283],"class_list":["post-800511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-industrial-relations","tag-labor","tag-labor-relations","tag-nursing","tag-picketing","tag-spare-news","tag-surrey","tag-surrey-memorial-hospital"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}