“It’s not a great system,” said Samantha Dixon in an interview Wednesday. “It’s not user friendly and just doesn’t work.”
A Weyburn health-care worker says despite assurances from the province that all recent payroll errors have been corrected, she’s still missing about $900 from her July 5 paycheque.
Samantha Dixon, a medical lab technologist, said the Saskatchewan government’s second attempt to roll out the Administrative Information Management System (AIMS) has left half of her workplace colleagues dealing with similar shortfalls.
“It’s not a great system,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s not user friendly and just doesn’t work.”
Dixon said that includes issues with compensation for on-call shifts, which has been a major challenge.
“That’s primarily what people are having trouble with,” she said. “That and overtime.”
As technologists, Dixon and her colleagues are on call for emergency room and in-patient matters, with shifts starting at 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. and lasting until 7 a.m. the next day. She described her on-call duties, in part, as returning to the lab, “drawing blood and running it.”
Dixon said the growing pains related to using the new system are resulting in people not getting paid.
In a statement Monday, the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) said “all missing wages from the first and second payroll runs have now been paid out to employees.” The SHA also said the error rate for the first and second pay period has been less than one per cent, as it was pre-AIMS.
But that doesn’t jive with Dixon’s reality.
“We are still waiting on the remainder of our pay,” she said Wednesday, adding that she did not take any on-call shifts during the second pay period because she hasn’t been compensated for the first one.
“I know there are still errors for my co-workers during that second pay period.”
Dixon said while she isn’t living paycheque-to-paycheque, many people are. Regardless, she still has payments to make and bills to pay.
“I still have debt. I still have things I’m paying off and I have to pay interest on everything that I owe,” she said. “There are a lot of people suffering more than me … Those are people that are choosing between gas, groceries or whatever.”
CUPE 5430, which represents Dixon, said it is tough to say how many of its workers have been affected provincewide.
“What I would say is that it does appear to be a minimization of the issue, which has been very hard on our members,” said an emailed response to the SHA’s stated error rates.
“We’re seeing staff missing regular pay, callback, overtime and mileage.”
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