By Sarah Borbridge
On September 8, 350 Dynacare laboratory workers walked off the job in an all-out strike, shutting down 22 laboratory and health service centres across Winnipeg, Brandon and the surrounding communities. The workers, represented by the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals (MAHCP), voted 99.7 percent in favour of a strike mandate in August. This came after multiple disrespectful counteroffers from the for-profit lab giant.
Currently, the wage gap for technicians, technologists and charge techs between the two sectors is staggering, ranging from 20 to 50 percent, and Dynacare’s offer would have left workers trailing even farther behind their public-sector counterparts. In 2017, when Dynacare was ramping up its takeover of public labs, wages were competitive with public colleagues, but the gaps have steadily widened since.
Just days before the job action, on September 1, Manitoba NDP Minister of Labour Malaya Marcelino filed an application with the Manitoba Labour Board to classify medical laboratory staff as essential workers. This move was an attempt to remove the workers’ right to strike, leaving Dynacare without consequence and stripping all bargaining power from employees.
The application came despite a known agreement made in March between Dynacare and MAHCP that an essential services agreement was not required under the Labour Relations Act. It was even more shocking given that these services had never been deemed essential – not even during the pandemic. The move clearly demonstrates the provincial NDP’s alliance with business against workers.
In response, MAHCP President Jason Linklater stated: “These severely underpaid laboratory technicians and technologists thought the Manitoba government had their backs. Instead, the NDP is siding with a private, American-owned company over the rights and interests of Manitoba workers by interfering in bargaining and threatening their Charter-protected right to strike.”
While in opposition, the NDP criticized the former Conservative government for its drive to privatize laboratory services and expand the private company. Even while campaigning, the NDP maintained that “profit has no place in our hospitals and health-care centres.”
Yet, a newly disclosed contract revealed how the provincial government continues to enable Dynacare’s low-wage approach. According to a September 4 MAHCP media release, the union obtained a previous contract through freedom of information showing that Dynacare received a nearly $5 million top-up and annual increases from the government after the last round of contract negotiations in 2022. In total, the additional provincial funding Dynacare received between 2018 and 2025 amounted to approximately $12 million – more than five to six times what workers received in wage increases over that same period.
While Dynacare’s base salary increases for unionized employees totaled only 9.9 percent over eight years (an average of 1.2 percent annually), Shared Health laboratory wages increased by roughly 40 percent.
“Dynacare has a history of squeezing their workers by claiming poverty, then secretly going to government for millions of dollars more,” said Linklater. “The Manitoba government has been 100 percent complicit in the exploitation of these hard-working laboratory professionals by a private, American-owned company.”
Dynacare opened its first lab in Manitoba in 2013, with several smaller labs already being taken over by what was then called Gamma-Dynacare. By 2018, it had achieved a monopoly in Winnipeg, becoming the sole provider of community-based specimen collection and analysis in the city. This shift came at the cost of small labs being shut down entirely, meaning seniors and people with limited access to transportation could no longer receive services at their doctor’s office or neighbourhood clinic. Yet once the NDP was in power, it signed several new contracts and opened more labs across the province.
Dynacare is a for-profit US-owned company with an operational base in Ontario. It was purchased in 2002 by LabCorp – a multinational clinical laboratory that operates in over 100 countries.
LabCorp has faced a slew of controversies, including overcharging governments, data breaches and sharing patient data. In 1992, it was one of the first companies prosecuted as part of “Operation Labscam” – a US-wide crackdown on healthcare fraud – after it was found submitting false claims to Medicare and Medicaid. The company paid out $182 million as a result of that investigation.
LabCorp also has a reputation for understaffing its workplace and enforcing extreme productivity quotas – practices in line with their stated goals to “operate the company in a non-union environment.”
The fight for Dynacare workers is both a defence of labour rights and resistance to the ever-encroaching privatization of healthcare, which the Manitoba NDP has given up on. The struggle in southern Manitoba blatantly shows the cost of outsourcing our care to American multinationals. Workers, and everyone who relies on these services, pay the high price of the profit model through low wages and overworked staff. Dynacare must pay their workers fair wages, on par with public sector workers.
If they can’t, it might be time to absorb these healthcare services back into the public sector.
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