Doctors and Nurses Divided: Rybnik Conflict Highlights Problem

For several years now, doctors and nurses, have been often divided by a salary gap and differing working conditions, and also tend to be organized in different trade unions acting independantly of one another. They have often negotiated working conditions seperately and hospitals have taken full advantage of these divisions. Doctors and other medical professionals have in recent years been more likely to receive pay raises and settle industrial disputes, even when their colleagues working as nurses have not had their demands met.

Nurses have found themselves at a severe disadvantage in the hierarchy of things. Since their labour tends to be severely undervalued, and less valued than doctors, they are more likely to raise demands for better pay since, in that respect, they are in more dire need of a raise than other medical professionals.

The nurses at the Psychiatric Hospital in Rybnik, together with other personal such as sanitary workers, went on strike on May 29. About 60 workers have been on strike ever since. The workers claim that they were promised a pay raise in 2007 but have not received it. They are demanding the raise and that the director of the hospital be fired.

In 2007, workers at the hospital went on strike. The strike was led by doctors, who even went on a hunger strike. A strike was also held in the hospital in 2006. In 2007, the doctors demanded that their salaries be doubled. They eventually received large raises.

Now it turns out that the doctors show little sympathy for the nurses and others who are trying to win a raise. The people who run the hospital system know what are the most effective ways to divide workers and break the strike. They just shut down two wards of the hospital and transfered out patients. They are threatening to liquidate the whole hospital, since it "isn't profitable". In response, doctors and therapists have turned against the strikers.

In a rather distasteful show of lack of class solidarity, some representatives of the doctors have written to the Voievodship condemning the strike and defending the management of the hospital. Someone hung a banner reading "We are against the strike" in the hospital and a letter was written to the hospital management apparently implying that the strikers should be fired. The doctors and therapists wrote that if the strikers come back to work, they would leave, which only can be understood to mean that they expect sanctions to be taken against the strikers, namely dismissal.

It is an extremely sad and disgusting situation that most clearly illustrates the problems of creating working class solidarity in Poland today.