All through the world, nurses and different well being care employees are participating in a rising wave of strikes and protests towards understaffing, exhausting workloads and the erosion of their dwelling requirements by the sharp rise in inflation.
In Germany, greater than 2,500 nurses at North Rhine-Westphalia college hospitals have been on strike for greater than a month over staffing ranges and pay. “We merely cannot take any extra,” a putting nurse in Essen stated. “We come dwelling bodily and psychologically damaged—this should lastly come to an finish.”
In the UK, 40,000 Scottish nurses at private and non-private amenities are planning to stroll out if their calls for for a ten % increase aren’t met. Tons of of hundreds of Nationwide Well being Service (NHS) employees within the UK additionally need to be part of the “summer season of discontent” work stoppages by railway employees, lecturers and different public sector employees.
In France, well being care employees at hospitals throughout the nation are strolling out Tuesday, June 7, to protest the dearth of sources, low wages and a wave of emergency room closures in public hospitals. This follows final month’s strike by 11,000 Spanish docs and nurses in Madrid and a nationwide strike by 20,000 docs in Turkey demanding higher wages and advantages.
In India, 20,000 nurses are putting authorities hospitals in Nagpur within the western state of Maharashtra. In close by Sri Lanka, well being care employees have been on the forefront of the strikes and mass protests demanding the resignation of the Rajapakse authorities and an finish to rising costs and IMF austerity calls for.
Final month, 10,000 nurses in New Zealand performed strikes and slowdowns to demand larger pay and secure staffing ranges. This adopted the primary stoppages by Australian public hospital nurses in New South Wales in additional than a decade. They struck twice, in February and March, in defiance of presidency bans and stay locked in a dispute.
In the US, 350 nurses, respiratory therapists and radiology technicians at St. Michael’s Medical Middle in Newark, New Jersey, has been on strike for greater than two weeks. One other 1,300 resident physicians at Los Angeles public hospitals—who commonly work 12-hour shifts and are paid the equal of barely the minimal wage—simply voted overwhelmingly to strike. Final week, 12,500 nurses in Minnesota had been performed a one-day picket, and tens of hundreds of nurses in Michigan, New York, California, Washington and different states face contract struggles within the coming weeks and months.
On Might 27, dozens of nurses walked off the job at Orlando Regional Medical Middle (ORMC) in Florida to protest inhuman workloads, which led to a tragic suicide by a affected person going unnotified for hours. This adopted the mass protests by nurses and different well being care employees in Washington DC and Nashville, Tennessee, demanding the dropping of felony prices towards former nurse RaDonda Vaught for a medical error attributable to persistent employees shortages and different security violations by Vanderbilt College Medical Middle.
The scapegoating of Vaught has led to a digital boycott of Vanderbilt by nurses and well being care employees, and medical heart officers have resorted to coaching shuttle drivers and different college employees to carry out scientific duties.
Everywhere in the world, well being care employees confront the identical insupportable situations, which have been enormously exacerbated by the response of the ruling courses to the pandemic. The prioritizing of income over human lives by capitalist governments led to the digital breakdown of well being care techniques, which had already been undermined by many years of cost-cutting and understaffing.
Burnout, stress and well being issues have led to an exodus of nurses, additional deepening the disaster. Situations have gotten so dangerous that 90 % of US nurses are contemplating leaving the career, based on a March 24 report in Healthcare IT Information, and medical faculty college students are switching their majors.
Removed from mobilizing well being care employees to oppose these situations, the commerce unions have labored to suppress and block the opposition of nurses and well being care employees. On the identical time, the unions have promoted all kinds of quarter and half measures—from laws to cap nurse-to-patient ratios and the establishing of extra labor-management committees for “secure staffing,” to Bernie Sanders’ deadend “Medicare for All” proposal within the US—which has accomplished and might do nothing to resolve the disaster.
The identical big hospital chains within the US—Tenet, UnitedHealthcare, Allina, Prime Healthcare—that acquired billions in authorities pandemic reduction are actually crying broke and telling employees they don’t have any cash to rent extra employees and supply dwelling wages to those that have risked their lives and well being.
The combat of well being care employees raises instantly the subordination of well being care to non-public revenue. The domination of the worldwide well being care system by big hospital monopolies, pharmaceutical, medical tools and insurance coverage firms makes it inconceivable to supply top quality well being care to everybody no matter revenue.
The key capitalist governments, led by the US, are diverting society’s sources to conflict, that’s, to the devices of dying not the preservation of life. Biden can discover $40 billion to ramp up the US-NATO proxy conflict towards Russia on high of the almost $1 trillion the US Protection Division eats up yearly.
On the identical time, the US authorities’s trustees for Social Safety and Medicare reported final week that the 2 essential federal applications—which 47 million retired employees depend on to complement their revenue and well being care bills—wouldn’t have the ability to absolutely fund advantages by 2028 to 2034.
What flows from this?
First, the struggles of well being care employees should be organized and unified via the event of rank-and-file committees, impartial of the corporatist commerce unions.
Nurses within the US have already taken a essential first step by forming a nationwide steering committee to construct rank-and-file committees in each hospital and well being care facility to combat the victimization of medical employees. That is a part of the combat to construct the Worldwide Staff Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to unite the struggles of well being care employees throughout all nationwide borders and develop it as a globally coordinated motion of the working class.
Second, the combat to prioritize life over revenue requires a political mobilization towards the capitalist system.
The results of the subordination of social wants to non-public revenue is clearly expressed within the catastrophic state of the well being care system. Nurses and well being care employees see this daily. The for-profit system is predicated on the exploitation of well being care employees and the sacrifice of affected person well being to the underside line of the medical companies and their traders. The personal insurance coverage trade exists for the only real function of denying correct care to sufferers that want it.
However this should be understood as a specific expression of the character of the capitalist system as a complete. Over the previous two-and-a-half years, 20 million individuals died from COVID-19, together with greater than 1 million within the US, as a result of the ruling class rejected probably the most primary public well being measures to cease transmission and eradicate the lethal virus. The inventory markets soared, and the world’s billionaires gorged themselves.
The worldwide motion of well being care employees is a part of a rising motion of the working class towards social inequality, austerity and conflict. A central intention of this motion should be the combat to take revenue out of medication and the institution of a socialist system, democratically managed by well being care employees and dedicated to the availability of top of the range medical care as a primary social proper for all.