For the past ten weeks, 1200 workers at LifeLabs in BC have been on a rotating strike for better wages and working conditions.
The workers are seeking wage parity for the lab techs, couriers and other employees who do the same jobs as their hospital-based counterparts, but are paid much less. Workers were very united in their resolve, as evidenced by their strike vote result of over 90%.
The LifeLabs workers’ contract expired over a year ago in March 2024. Despite best efforts by the union, management hasn’t come to the bargaining table with a fair offer that addresses unrealistic workloads and low pay. Instead, the company presented proposals that would continue the inadequate wages and unreasonable workload that workers now face, and even proposed clawing back sick leave benefits.
Spring members paid a recent visit to the picket line and spoke to workers about the challenges they’re facing.
Strikebreaking through “essential services”
LifeLabs workers, unionized by BCGEU, are designated an essential service, and therefore only allowed to have a very limited number of people out on strike and picketing. Meanwhile, at the main lab location in Burnaby, most workers (alongside a handful of middle managers) continue to perform all the normal employee duties such as laboratory testing and couriering of lab samples. This benefits the employer by taking away the pressure to settle, and also creates division between workers who are picketing and those who are not. Since the employer had a say over which jobs were most ‘essential,’ workers on the picket line told us that the employer chose to cover the shorter shifts with middle management, leaving the longer and more difficult jobs to still be done by workers.
Workers we spoke to on the picket line were frustrated by the lack of progress in the strike, and many recognized that the strike would likely have been resolved quickly had they been allowed to do a full withdrawal of services as they had done in the past (for example, a strike in 2016 was resolved in one day after the BC NDP government intervened).
Public health, private profits
Strikers explained that many members of the public are surprised to hear that LifeLabs, a private company, performs what is deemed an essential service in BC: medical laboratory testing. How could the government allow something as crucial to public health care as laboratory testing to be controlled by a private, for-profit company, let alone one based in the U.S.? Lifelabs started decades ago as a non-profit, begun by two BC doctors who saw a lack of capacity in BC’s hospital-based laboratories to deal with the number of required laboratory tests. Unfortunately, this outsourcing of what should have been a part of BC’s public healthcare infrastructure was to cause big problems down the road. The non-profit grew, and eventually was bought in 2007 by the Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System (OMERS), but remained privately owned.
More recently, LifeLabs was bought by an American company, Quest Diagnostics, for $1.35 billion—$40 million more than the better of two offers by Canadian companies. The huge purchase price suggested to many critics that Quest saw an opportunity to reap big profits from this private healthcare company, something that would likely result in poorer wages and working conditions for LifeLabs workers, and poorer services provided to patients, since public sector workers’ working conditions directly affect patient services.
Striking workers we spoke to had many questions and concerns about LifeLabs’ owners. LifeLabs now refers to people accessing LifeLabs services as ‘customers’ rather than ‘patients,’ which seems to reflect their focus on profits over health. There are concerns over patient records being stored on U.S. servers, and indeed, LifeLabs data was hacked at the beginning of the pandemic, which even led to a class action lawsuit.
But the biggest concern is that an essential part of the BC public healthcare system is now in the hands of a big U.S. corporation that is difficult to regulate, and that doesn’t even pay a living wage. LifeLabs’ CEO has promised that company profits will stay in Canada, but whether they do or not, the bigger issue is that this should not be a for-profit service in the first place, be it Canadian or American. Several picketers we talked to agreed that LifeLabs should be publicly owned and that the BC government should step in and restore LifeLabs to the public sector where it belongs. Indeed, the BC Health Coalition sent an open letter to BC Premier David Eby this month, asking for Lifelabs to be brought back under public ownership.
LifeLabs makes over a quarter billion dollars a year in BC. This money comes from tax revenues paid to the BC government—taxes that we know are mostly coming from working people, as the rich and corporations take advantage of loopholes to pay as little in taxes as possible. This money should not be going to pay for a high-priced CEO or towards shareholder profits, but should be reinvested to pay for our underfunded public healthcare services—including better wages and working conditions for the workers who make public health possible.
You can sign BCGEU’s petition to bring LifeLabs back into the public sector and use their online tool to send an email to the BC government at the advocacy website www.handsoffourhealthcare.ca. Workers are still picketing many locations on a rotating schedule; to find a picket line in the lower mainland of BC, contact BCGEU at Samuel.Antoine@bcgeu.ca or find your local union contact here.
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