About 5,500 doctors held a 24-hour nationwide strike in
New Zealand on May 1 in protest against a pay offer of just
1.5 percent, spread over two years. This would be a major
pay cut in real terms, with annual inflation at 2.6 percent
for the year to March.
It was the first
ever full-day strike by senior doctors in the country’s
public hospitals, called by the Association of Salaried
Medical Specialists (ASMS). It follows strikes last year by
thousands of junior doctors and by tens of thousands of
nurses, and repeated strikes this year by medical laboratory
workers.
The doctors’ strike coincided
with strikes by 370 perioperative nurses at Auckland City
Hospital, in protest over understaffing, and by nearly 1,000
home support workers employed by Access Community Health,
who have received no pay increase for nearly two years. The
unions involved—the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO)
and the Public Service Association (PSA)—limited these
strikes to just two hours.
These actions reflect
widespread opposition to the right-wing National Party-led
coalition government’s intensifying assault on the public
health system.
The day before the doctors’ strike,
Health NZ confirmed that it has axed 540 jobs from its IT
department, reducing its staffing by about a third. This
will place further pressure on public hospitals’
antiquated computer systems.
Hospitals are being
instructed to find hundreds of millions of dollars in cost
savings and are leaving vacant positions unfilled. According
to the ASMS, the vacancy rate for senior medical officers
across the country is 12 percent, but in some areas it is
more than 40 percent.
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Health Minister Simeon Brown
said he was “disappointed” with the strike. He cynically
told the media that “an estimated 4,300 procedures such as
hip operations, knee operations, cataract removals and
critical specialist assessments would be delayed as a result
of this strike.”
In fact, the austerity measures
imposed by his government—and the previous Labour
Party-led government—have produced the crisis of unmet
need. According to Newsroom, “The waitlist for elective
procedures sat at 76,677 at the end of September, with
30,173 waiting for more than four months and 2,159 waiting
for more than a year.”
One News reported that
200,000 people are currently waiting to receive a specialist
assessment, with long wait times often leading to serious
harm. Doctor Allan Moffitt told the outlet: “I have a
patient who had cancer and I could tell that it was a
serious type of cancer. Her referral took over six months to
be seen.”
Emergency departments are frequently
filled above capacity, resulting in significant delays for
urgent cases. Newsroom reports that data for 2024 shows
ambulances “waited 35 minutes, on average, to hand
patients over to hospitals.”
One doctor wrote in the
r/newzealand Reddit forum that, for them, the strike was
“about retaining colleagues so that work isn’t utter
misery. We are haemorrhaging specialists at our hospital,
and with each resignation, there’s more strain on those
who stay.”
Striking Wellington physician Andrew
Davies told Radio NZ the staffing crisis was the major
issue: “We’ve got vacant jobs that we’re not allowed
to advertise. It’s lies that they’re not getting rid of
front-line staff.”
In response to the crisis, the
government is outsourcing thousands of procedures to private
hospitals, further undermining the public system and paving
the way for privatisation.
More budget cuts are being
prepared. Finance Minister Nicola Willis revealed on April
29 that in response to the deteriorating economic
outlook—the US trade war targeting China could trigger a
global recession—the government will slash new spending in
this year’s budget from the previously announced $NZ2.4
billion to just $1.3 billion.
This will be the
smallest spending increase in a decade. Treasury officials
previously stated that $2.5 billion in new spending was the
minimum required just to meet the growing cost of delivering
services.
The opposition Labour Party’s criticism of
the government’s cuts is thoroughly hypocritical. The
previous Labour-led government oversaw a worsening crisis in
the health system, including expanding waiting times for
surgery and an effective wage freeze, which prompted strikes
by nurses, midwives, doctors and other workers. Labour’s
decision in 2022 to remove all restrictions on the spread of
COVID-19 led to thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of
hospitalisations, placing extraordinary pressure on
hospitals.
Labour supports the government’s plan to
double military spending from 1 to 2 percent of gross
domestic product, which will be funded at the expense of
health, education and other essential programs. The
government has pledged an extra $12 billion for defence over
four years to further integrate New Zealand into US-led
imperialist war plans.
Workers also confront a trade
union bureaucracy that is enforcing government cuts and
preventing an effective, unified struggle against austerity.
The various health unions have ensured that different
sections of workers remain isolated from each other, with
strikes limited to a day or less.
It has
been more than five months since more than 30,000 nurses
struck after rejecting a 1.5 percent pay offer, with the
dispute still unresolved. The NZNO is seeking to wear down
its members and persuade them to accept a
sellout.
The PSA is demanding that even
more money be spent on the military, while the union
collaborates in imposing redundancies across multiple
government departments.
The ASMS returned to
negotiations with Health NZ the day after the doctors’
strike. The government agency has requested facilitated
bargaining by the Employment Relations Authority.
The
union’s Sarah Dalton signalled that the union leadership
is backing away from its claim for a 12 percent pay
increase. She told the New Zealand Herald: “It may not be
that we achieve 12 percent, but if we can’t achieve better
than what is on offer at the moment, we will not be able to
settle this.”
The Socialist Equality Group warns
that a sellout is being prepared. Doctors, nurses and other
healthcare workers can only fight back against the
government’s cuts and privatisation plans if they take
matters out of the hands of the union bureaucracy.
Rank-and-file committees, controlled by workers themselves,
should be established in every hospital to coordinate their
struggle.
The crisis in the health system also raises
the need for a socialist political perspective. Workers must
reject the fraud that well-funded, properly staffed and
freely available public healthcare is “unaffordable” and
that they have to be “realistic” and accept pay
cuts.
The billions of dollars hoarded by the
super-rich should be used to vastly expand the public health
system and put an end to poverty and inequality. Workers
must also demand an end to military spending, with the money
redirected into health and other vital social
programs.
By Tom Peters, Socialist
Equality Group
3 May 2025
Original
url:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/05/03/gsic-m03.html
