The First Of Many? If the CTU pledged itself to ensuring that the Nurses fight does not turn into a solitary struggle. If frontline health professionals could be presented as merely the first of many workers ready to embrace the tactics necessary to win substantial improvements in their wages and conditions, then trade unionism in New Zealand could have a new birth of freedom.
NEW ZEALAND’S NURSES are about to discover whether their
store of public good-will is big enough to see them through a strike. New
Zealanders with experience of this country’s public health system almost always
speak very highly of its staff. Nurses in particular draw the public’s praise
and respect. In our overburdened and understaffed hospitals they display the
weary-but-unflinching professionalism of workers required to operate in an
environment of more-or-less permanent crisis.
No one knows better that this country’s frontline health
professionals how potentially dangerous this situation can become. New Zealand
needs more nurses – lots more nurses. But to keep the staff it already has –
let alone attract new recruits – nurses insist they must be paid more. Lots
more.
But, how much more? That is the question. In an economy
where roughly half the paid workforce have not had a pay-rise for close to two
years, will the NZ Nurses’ Organisation’s demand for an immediate, across the
board, 11 percent increase strike the average Kiwi as “about right” or “too
much”. With an experienced registered nurse’s salary set to rise from $66,755
to $77,386 by December next year under
the present offer, will the two-thirds of workers who earn considerably
less than that sum (in 2016 the median NZ income was just $48,800) regard the
union’s proposed strike action as reasonable – or unreasonable?
The offer on the table also guarantees that an additional
500 nurses will be recruited to the national health-sector workforce. This is
clever. The single most important contributing factor to the crisis in the
nation’s hospital wards is chronic understaffing. More than anything else it is
the personal toll extracted by the excessive workloads caused by understaffing
that is fuelling nurses’ anger and impatience with the District Health Boards’
management. It would be interesting to know whether the 9 percent offer on the
table would be deemed enough if nurses could be convinced that their workloads
were about to be reduced very rapidly to more bearable levels.
The DHB negotiators have also been clever in advancing the
figure of half-a-billion dollars as the all-up cost of the settlement on the
table. Many New Zealanders will see this as an extraordinarily generous sum –
especially when the money on offer has been drawn from their taxes. In
rejecting the offer, the Nurses’ union runs the risk of being dismissed
as either unrealistic or greedy – or both.
The best way to avoid this perception taking hold would be
for the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) to present the Nurses’ claim as the first
of many. After nearly a decade of both public- and private-sector wage
restraint, the unions should argue, the time has come for working people to
make up the lost ground. The CTU should also emphasise the fact that Nurses are
not the only workers in New Zealand who have been expected to work harder and
longer for no appreciable improvement in their overall living standards. Nurses
are, however, the first occupational group to vote in favour of doing something
about it.
If the CTU pledged itself to ensuring that the Nurses fight
does not turn into a solitary struggle. If frontline health professionals could
be presented as merely the first of many workers ready to embrace the tactics
necessary to win substantial improvements in their wages and conditions, then
trade unionism in New Zealand could have a new birth of freedom.
If the nurses are left to fight this battle on their own,
however, then, sadly, there is a better than even chance that the politics of
envy and resentment will prevail over the politics of solidarity.
A version of this
essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 19 June 2018.
