Some 5,500 senior doctors in New Zealand’s public
hospitals will strike nationwide on May 1 over pay and
workforce shortages. Members of the Association of Salaried
Medical Specialists (ASMS) voted, with 86 percent in favour,
for the union’s first 24-hour strike since it was
established in 1989.
The strike is part of a growing
rebellion by health workers internationally against attacks
by capitalist governments, led by the US Trump
administration, on public health services. In Australia a
wave of strikes and protests has recently been held by
doctors, nurses and psychiatrists, only to be isolated and
shut down by the respective trade unions.
ASMS
executive director Sarah Dalton told media the union has
been in bargaining with Health NZ Te Whatu Ora since last
August, and the employers had not moved “an inch.”
Hospital specialists are seeking a 12 percent pay rise but
are being offered a paltry 1 to 1.5 percent—a pay cut.
Data released by Stats NZ on April 17 showed inflation was
2.5 percent for the year to March, rising from 2.2 percent
in December.
Dalton said that one of the sticking
points was that Resident Medical Officers (RMOs), or junior
doctors, received a pay settlement following industrial
action last year, which meant pay rates had become
“unbalanced.” Doctors who had completed training and
were ready to take up their first specialist appointment
faced a pay drop. “It is important that specialists earn
more than the doctors they are required to train and
supervise,” Dalton said.
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The first ever strikes by
senior doctors in September 2023 were limited by the ASMS to
three stoppages for two to four hours each. Under the then
Labour government’s public sector pay “restraint”
policy, the specialists had either no pay increase, or
below-inflation pay rises, since 2020. The ASMS entered
mediated talks after the second stoppage and eventually
reached a publicly undisclosed settlement.
A Health NZ
spokesman said if the May 1 strike goes ahead it could see
4,300 elective surgeries or appointments cancelled. Between
3,000 and 4,300 radiology procedures could also be
postponed. Health Minister Simeon Brown declared: “This
isn’t how we fix the health system. It’s a decision that
will hurt patients.”
A war of words has erupted
between Brown and the ASMS. Brown accused the union of using
patients as “bargaining chips.” He demanded the ASMS get
back to the negotiating table, accusing the union of putting
“politics ahead of patients” and making waiting lists
even worse.
The charge was met with a furious response
from Northland emergency doctor Gary Payinda who dismissed
the remark as “reprehensible.” He told Radio NZ (RNZ)
striking was “the one thing we can do to address chronic
doctor under-staffing and intentional nurse
under-staffing.” Payinda said: “I had an unsuccessful
resuscitation on a trauma patient last night. What has he
[Brown] done in the past 24 hours?”
Dalton retorted
that patients are “a sacrificial lamb to our under-staffed
health service every single day. If [Health NZ] Te Whatu Ora
invested in the doctors and other health workers we needed,
we wouldn’t be having to take this action.” She noted
the senior doctor vacancy rate is 12 percent and some
hospitals have vacancy rates as high as 45
percent.
Dalton also challenged claims by Brown that
doctors were paid an average salary of $NZ343,500. “I’ve
had a deluge of emails from our members saying if they
earned that much money there would be no strike action,”
she said. The average salary is closer to $240,000 a
year.
The forthcoming strike is only
the latest in a rising struggle of medical workers against
underfunding, under-staffing, low pay and sweeping austerity
in the public health system under governments of all
stripes, intensified by the current far-right National
Party-NZ First-ACT Party
coalition.
More than 30,000 nurses,
healthcare assistants and midwives took part in an
eight-hour nationwide strike on December 3, followed by a
series of four-hour strikes over the next 10 days. Health NZ
once again offered an effective pay cut, a 1.5 percent rise
over two years. While this dispute drags on in the hands of
the NZ Nurses Organisation (NZNO), 900 medical laboratory
workers in the privatised blood testing service have struck
twice since February over low pay and unsustainable
workloads.
Deep cuts are being imposed on the run-down
hospital system that has been starved of funding for
decades. Last year Health NZ slashed more than 560 so-called
“back office” jobs. This week the agency reported more
than 2,400 positions are now on the line, with about half
currently vacant. Last year, Health NZ’s expected deficit
for 2024-25 was $1.1 billion, and change was needed to
“live within budget,” then chief executive Margie Apa
declared.
Hospitals have imposed unofficial hiring
freezes to meet cost-saving targets. The entire hospital
network is already in crisis.
Last year it was
reported that Rotorua Hospital’s Emergency Department had
just 12 senior doctors, most of them part-time. Conditions
were so dire that patients were being sent back to the
emergency department from other wards.
Hospitals in
Gisborne and Nelson are, according to staff, on the brink of
collapse. A group of 30 doctors wrote to the government last
month, warning that about 40 percent of senior positions in
Gisborne were vacant, meaning general medical wards could
have to close for several days per week. They told RNZ it
was “demoralising” to ask for help, only to be told
“there is no crisis.”
Hundreds of
Nelson residents protested on April 12 over concerns about
staffing at the hospital and the impact on patients. Nelson
has the worst wait times in the country for first specialist
assessments. Out of 7,297 people waiting for an assessment
or elective surgery, 4,120 are waiting longer than the
recommended four-month
timeframe.
Oncology nurse Amanda
Field who has worked at Nelson Hospital for 25 years told
RNZ the shortages, rundown buildings and lack of bed space
is the worst she’s ever seen, but staff were told there
wasn’t “money in the bucket” for upgrades or changes.
With persistent staffing shortages, which included no
medical registrar for a period, “nurses are working on the
floor with a toilet that might not flush or they can’t
wash their hands in one room because the sink doesn’t
work.”
Brown was appointed to the health portfolio
in January to eviscerate the public system and prepare large
chunks for privatisation. He immediately directed Health NZ
to outsource 10,579 procedures by the end of June and will
divert $50 million to private companies under the scheme,
further entrenching the country’s two-tier healthcare
system.
This is taking place amid a vast increase to
military spending, to integrate New Zealand into US
imperialist war plans targeting China. A recent Defence
Capability Plan will nearly double military spending from
just over 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP in 8 years. At least
$NZ12 billion in new spending, which is supported by the
opposition Labour Party, will be paid for by an even greater
assault on public services.
The unions, which have
mobilised no fight to save jobs in the health sector or
anywhere else, are isolating the pay disputes from each
other as they prepare to impose a series of sell-outs. In
nearly five months since the pre-Christmas nurses’
strikes, the NZNO has been totally silent on the dispute.
The bureaucracy is clearly deeply concerned about how to
contain widespread anger among members.
The
full-frontal assault on public health requires a unified
fight by all sections of the workforce, supported by the
wider working class, against austerity and militarism. Such
a struggle is vehemently opposed by the union apparatus,
whose well-paid bureaucrats are enforcing the government’s
agenda.
The Socialist Equality Group (NZ) warns that
to carry forward their struggle doctors, nurses, lab workers
and administration staff must take matters into their own
hands. What is needed is to establish a network of
rank-and-file committees to lead a unified struggle against
the continuing evisceration of jobs, wages and conditions,
and to stop the destruction of the public health
system.
By John Braddock, Socialist
Equality Group
23 April 2025
Original url: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/23/gosl-a23.html
