Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 11

I am going to air some workplace laundry on this blogpost, as an example of the impact of workplace stigma on people who work in my position. I have mentioned previously in other parts of this blog that mental health peer support workers earn vastly less than a living wage, frozen at twelve dollars an hour since 2010. While my city, Vancouver, has become impossibly expensive to live in, those of us who work in vulnerable situations with vulnerable adults and little and often no support from our supervisors are expected to subsist at a starvation wage that now pays us sixty-five cents above the minimum. As contracted workers we have no rights, privileges or benefits. There has long been a tacit expectation, thanks to workplace stigma, that peer support workers shouldn't need a living wage since we are all going to be receiving a disability pension, that in itself pays a whopping thousand bucks a month. Even with the addition of a low wage for doing part time work, the best paid peer support workers are still going to remain well below the poverty line. Unlike our unionized colleagues, who earn three times or better (I don't have the stats available and they just don't like it when we do this kind of math!), we have to make do on very little, doing similar or identical work to our much better paid colleagues, yet being paid a pittance for our efforts. The excuse of course is going to be that wages should be commensurate to training and education. However, when we are not even getting paid a living wage, without any promise or likelihood of getting even a tiny raise, then this implies a certain unspoken contempt. I no longer have a work phone. It died over a month ago. Generally peer support workers are not given mobile phones. Not only can they not find the funding to pay us a decent wage, but trusting the kids with a phone? Don't even think it! In my case an exception was made because, unlike a lot of peer support workers, I do this full time and have often found myself in situations where not having a phone on the ready has impacted my ability to work well with my clients and colleagues. They managed to find me one. When that phone died three years later they found me a new one. Now, I am suddenly informed that they can no longer do this for me. And this is making it difficult for me to do my job well, as I cannot connect with clients when they are needing to hear from me in order to confirm arrangements and remind them of our appointments, neither am I easily available to my supervisors and coworkers, since things often change on the ready and we need to be easily available for these updates. They leave us on the dust heap of institutionalized stigma and expect us to stay there and just suck it up. Well, they had better be prepared for some of it being spitted back, and that is exactly what I am doing on this blog. here is a sample of my recent communications with my supervisors, any identifying information being edited out, of course: "Not the greatest news, and the way they use our status as contract workers for this kind of wiggle room I find troubling, and this is going to make my job difficult.   If they would pay us a decent wage then I could afford to get my own phone, but on twelve dollars an hour I don't think that would be realistic as I need my landline for door entry  for visitors, so I can't give that up and replace my landline with a mobile device.  I have been lobbying between the Ministry of Health and the Consumer Support Office for a living wage for PSW's.  If they really valued and respected us and the kind of work we do, then I am persuaded that things would be rather different, but they are not, and there is very little likelihood that anything is going to change before I retire in three years. I am seriously considering getting the news media sources involved in this.