ODSP staff across Ontario walk for a healthy workplace to protest understaffing crisis

Toronto  – Hundreds of available Ontario Disability Support Program workers put aside their duties at noon today to participate in dozens of one-hour walks across the province to protest a severe shortfall in the number of frontline workers.

“The ODSP delivery system is broken and the McGuinty government is doing nothing to fix it,” said Ontario Public Service Employees Union president Warren (Smokey) Thomas. OPSEU represents more than 1,200 ODSP workers, who are responsible for the administration and delivery of $2.6 billion in benefits to disabled Ontarians struggling to survive on poverty incomes.

A 2007 report prepared by Prof. Wayne Lewchuk of McMaster University and paid for by the Ministry of Community and Social Services found that ODSP workers suffer from abnormal rates of stress, tension, ill health and high absentee rates caused by caseload demands that are twice the levels found in other provinces.

ODSP income support specialists have a caseload ratio of 530 benefit claims for every one staff worker. A similar worker in B.C. has a caseload ration of 300:1. In Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the rate is lower than 200:1.

“The Lewchuk report made it perfectly clear: the health of our workers is suffering because the government refuses to ease the incredible demands they face in the workplace. This understaffing crisis means the most vulnerable citizens in Ontario are not receiving the public service they are entitled to,” said Thomas.

Today’s Walk for a Healthy Workplace in more than 40 communities across Ontario is an effort to draw public attention to the understaffing crisis in the ODSP. Thomas said the McGuinty government can make good on its pledge to reduce poverty rates in the province by addressing the public service needs of more than 325,000 Ontarians and their families who rely on the ODSP.