Australia: New South Wales private hospital nurses strike for better pay and safer working conditions

Nurses and midwives working at Ramsay Health Care, Australia’s largest private hospital operator, walked for 24 hours across NSW on Tuesday demanding a 20 per cent pay rise over three years and a mandatory minimum nurse-to-patient ratio in all sectors . The company’s last pay rise for nurses and midwives was 1.5 per cent in July 2022, when the official inflation rate was 6.1 per cent.

Some of Ramsay’s striking nurses and midwives at a rally in Sydney on November 26, 2024.

About 500 strikers, including representatives from many of the company’s 17 hospitals in New South Wales, gathered in Hyde Park and headed to Ramsay’s annual general meeting at the Sheraton Hotel in central Sydney. It was the first 24-hour strike in the state’s history by members of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association (NSWNMA) at Ramsay hospitals.

Ramsay’s 5,000 members are also demanding higher fine rates, expanded parental and personal leave rights, and other improvements to working conditions. Private hospital nurses and midwives in NSW are paid less and receive less annual, maternity and personal leave than their colleagues in the state’s public hospitals.

NSWNMA began negotiations with the company in April 2023 and has since held 18 “bargaining meetings,” dragging out negotiations and organizing low-level actions designed to tire its members into accepting a union cost-cutting agreement that supports the company. profit. Ramsay Health Care, which has more than 400 hospitals worldwide, including 71 in Australia, made a profit of almost $900 million last year after selling its Asian hospitals.

The company’s latest wage proposal was just 11 percent over three years, with no specific proposals on nurse-to-patient ratios. NSWNMA members overwhelmingly rejected the proposal.

On Tuesday, Ramsay’s striking nurses and midwives, like their colleagues at Healthscope private hospitals and more than 65,000 public hospital nurses in NSW currently embroiled in protracted labor disputes, made their determination to fight clear. Nurses and midwives carried signs condemning the company for failing to raise their wages amid record rising costs of living and pointing out unsafe conditions caused by staffing shortages.

NSWNMA officials spoke at a rally on Tuesday condemning the company for its “corporate greed”, punctuated by constant chants of “Shame, Ramsay, shame” and dog whistles distributed by the union. All this was aimed at hiding the political reputation of the union, which had imposed previous cost-cutting agreements, and preventing any serious discussion among nurses and midwives about how to advance their fight.

“Ramsay can no longer put profits before staff and patients,” NSWNMA general secretary Shay Candish said. Ramsay shareholders, she cried, must “stand up” for nurses and midwives against “corporate greed”.

Candish’s position is a disingenuous attempt to promote the dangerous illusion that a multi-million dollar corporation can be pressured to change its profit-oriented business model. This is the equivalent of asking a leopard to change its spots!

David Thody, chairman of Ramsay, said in response to nurses’ questions at the AGM about their pay demands: “Our aim is to find a balanced outcome that supports our people and is sustainable for the business.”

To put it into plain English, more negotiations and cooperation with the union are needed to put together a corporate deal that will “prop up” the corporate giant’s profits in line with the demands of the stock market.

Striking Ramsay nurses and midwives in Sydney, 26 November 2024

While Candish and other union representatives have called on Ramsay’s nurses and midwives to “stay strong” and “stand together”, their course of action is the exact opposite – keeping Ramsay’s workers isolated and weakening their morale.

Not a single union representative mentioned the 65,000 NSW public sector nurses and midwives currently fighting the Minns Labor government over pay and working conditions, or the approximately 4,000 Healthscope private hospital nurses and midwives who are speaking out against the company’s proposal to cut wages and attacks on their working conditions.

On November 13, just two weeks earlier, 10,000 members of the NSWNMA public hospital walked off the job and marched to State Parliament. They demanded an immediate 15 per cent pay rise, more staff and better working conditions from the Minns Labor government.

Last week, hundreds of NSWNMA members from Healthscope, Australia’s second-largest private hospital provider, rallied for two hours in Sydney’s west and southwest to demand better pay and better performance. This followed a two-hour strike on November 5 by 300 NSWNMA members at Healthscope Northern Beaches Hospital in Sydney.

NSWNMA management is extremely hostile to any amalgamation of this fight and does everything possible to isolate workers by their employers or even individual hospitals.

Moreover, the NSWNMA is desperate to isolate nurses and midwives from other sectors of the healthcare workforce or the wider working class. This was clearly demonstrated in the public sector dispute, where union leadership insisted that nurses and midwives were being discriminated against by employers and the Labor government solely because their industry was predominantly female. This is political sabotage.

Poor pay and exploitative working conditions, and extremely low and unsafe staffing levels are not “gender issues” but are part of a growing government and employer crackdown on wages, staffing levels and hard-won working conditions for all sections of the workforce. variety. Demands by federal and state governments and private employers for wage cuts, carried out with the active support of labor unions, are a class attack. They are brutally applied everywhere, regardless of the gender of the workers.

NSW public and private hospital nurses, who all face the same pressures over their pay and working conditions, are subject to a variety of separate enterprise agreements and awards under Australia’s repressive industrial relations laws. While NSWNWA may claim that this prevents them from organizing united action for nurses and midwives across the state, these laws were developed and passed with the active and unanimous support of Australian trade unions. Their goal was and remains to stop the unified actions, increase productivity and profits.

Nurses and midwives cannot continue to fight for decent wages and safe nurse-to-patient ratios in all parts of the health sector under the dominance of a union bureaucracy that rejects any fight against Australia’s repressive industrial relations laws.

The first step is for nurses and midwives to recognize that they are engaged in a political struggle not only against the private health corporations that are supported and rapidly expanded by state and federal Labor governments across the country, but also against the union officials who impose their dictates.

What is required is the creation of grassroots committees of nurses and midwives in hospitals and all other health care settings to democratically discuss and decide on demands based on their actual needs. These should include an immediate 30 percent wage increase, safe staffing levels, and humane hours and working conditions in all health care facilities.

These committees, which must be completely independent of the trade union bureaucracy, are the only means by which nurses and midwives can contact all other health workers, as well as the wider community, to discuss the development of joint action.

In contrast to government spending billions of dollars in military spending, tax cuts, and other concessions to the rich, health care workers must fight for a socialist agenda with a huge expansion of public health funds and the provision of free, high-quality health care. treatment for everyone.

The privatization of healthcare and other essential services must not only be stopped, but reversed. All existing private hospitals should be transferred to public ownership and under democratic workers’ control.

We urge nurses, midwives and all health workers who agree with this basic analysis to form a committee among the frontline staff in your hospital, distribute copies of this article to your colleagues and contact the Frontline Health Workers Committee to discuss how to expand and continue your fight.

Australia: New South Wales private hospital nurses strike for better pay and safer working conditions

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