TORONTO -- Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced a temporary "pandemic payment" for front-line workers risking their lives amid the COVID-19 pandemic. These workers would receive an additional $4 an hour for the next sixteen weeks, as well as a possible $250 lump-sum a month if they worked 100 hours or more.
Here are the employees who are eligible for this wage increase:
Health care and long-term care:
Eligible workplaces include acute hospitals, long-term care homes (private, municipal and not-for-profit), licensed retirement homes, and home and community care.
Eligible workers include:
- Personal support workers
- Registered nurses
- Registered practical nurses
- Nurse practitioners
- Attendant care workers
- Auxiliary staff, including:
- Porters, cook, custodian, housekeeping, laundry facilities and other key workers.
- Developmental services workers
- Mental health and addictions workers
Social services:
Eligible workplaces include homes supporting people with developmental disabilities, intervenor residential sites, Indigenous healing and wellness facilities or shelters, shelters for survivors of gender-based violence and human trafficking,yYouth justice residential facilities, licensed children's residential sites, directly operated residential facility, emergency shelters, supportive housing facilities, respite/drop-in centres, temporary shelter facilities,and hotels and motels used for self-isolation and/or shelter overflow.
Eligible workers include:
- Direct support workers (e.g. developmental service workers, staff in licensed children's residential sites, in-take/outreach workers)
- Clinical staff
- Housekeeping staff
- Security staff
- Administration personnel
- Maintenance staff
- Food service workers
- Nursing staff
Corrections:
Eligible workplaces include adult correctional facilities and youth justice facilities in Ontario.
Eligible workers include:
- Correctional officers
- Youth services officers
- Nurses
- Healthcare staff
- Social workers
- Food service
- Maintenance staff
- Programming personnel
- Administration personnel
- Institutional liaison officers
- TRILCOR personnel
- Native inmate liaison officers
- Chaplains
The province further expanded the list of eligible workers on April 28 to include the following Ontario Public Service Employees Union staff:
- Respiratory therapists
- Paramedics
- Public health nurses
- All addictions and mental health workers who, in a congregate setting, serve the same functions as workers in acute-care hospital settings previously noted as receiving pandemic pay.
