Nurses take the lead in healthworkers' struggle
International Viewpoint #149 • October 17, 1988
FRANCE
N FRANCE as elsewhere, the watch- words of the 1980s have been "rationalization" and "rollback" as far as the public sector is concerned. Making nationalized industries like the health service profitable has been the unattainable goal of successive French administrations, and the strangely hybrid Rocard government is no exception in this regard.
But the nurses have had enough. As early as March, a joint demonstration was called by the main nurses' union, the CFDT (a national trade union federation politically close to the Socialist Party), and the anesthetists' leadership.
Nurses' coordination set up in April
In April, undoubtedly influenced by the healthworkers' struggle in Britain (see IV 135 &136), over 100 nurses from 22 hospitals in the Paris region came together to discuss their demands. These included a retroactive payment of 2,000FF [about $314 ] to make up for an ongoing loss of purchasing power, a general cost-of-living adjustment tied to the price index and to be built into salaries, similar rises in overtime payments, access to nursing courses, and professional training and status.
In June, the coordinating meeting attracted 200 nurses from 60 hospitals, seven of which were provincial, and it was decided to circulate a petition in the hospitals and plan a demonstration and one-day strike for September 29.
By September 15, a general assembly of the developing leadership attracted 500 nurses from 108 hospitals in the Paris region and 12 in the provinces.
The unprecedented growth of organized resistance by nurses to years of austerity in the health services is reflective of the same trend that produced the 1986-87 student strikes against the Devaquet bill, the rail strike, and the teachers' struggle.
For years, nurses have been regarded as Florence Nightingale-type "angels of mercy", who minister to the suffering without thought for themselves. The less exalted side of the job has been deliberately ignored - bedpans and broomsticks are bad press - while the stress of continually confronting death and disease, which results in nervous breakdowns and a high rate of attrition in the profession, are subordinated to this glamorized vision of thousands of saintly women nobly sacrificing themselves. 12 The reality is overworked nurses bur• dened with so many routine duties that
ON SEPTEMBER 29,
240,000 nurses walked out in a one-day strike that was 80% successful. In
Paris, 30,000 nurses and other healthworkers demonstrated, joined by thousands more in the provinces, with hospitals all over France being affected.
The successful walk-out was the culmination of six months of intensive organizing efforts by nurses fed up with a chronic lack of recognition and dwindling real wages, and similar actions are planned for the near future.
Although the Minister for
Health, Claude Evin, has done little as yet to address the nurses' demands, the movement for change is so widespread and well-organized that there is little doubt this healthy
"infection" will spread further, quickly contaminating other sections of the health sector's workforce.
ELIZABETH MILLER they cannot be as supportive of patients as they would wish; nurses who work all day in the public sector and then contract themselves out at night to make ends meet.
They are paid only about 1,000FF more than the monthly cross-sectoral minimum wage.
At the other end of the medical spectrum, their status is constantly in question, as highly-paid doctors (and even patients)
often ignore the three years of rigorous training nurses have to undergo to get their state certificate, often viewing nurses as merely the vigilant night-guard or the hand that administers the injection.
The final straw was the December 1987 governmental bill that effectively stripped nurses of their status by opening up nursing courses to anyone, regardless of previous training or degrees. This measure, if implemented, would reduce nurses many years experience and seniority to the same level as health aids or unqualified trainees and ultimately lower their already inadequate salaries to a truly pathetic level. Health aids and trainee nurses have recognized the dangers that this poses for them as well and have come out in support of the nurses' struggles. Many participated in the national day of action on September 29.
The final factor in this struggle is the low percentage of nurses who are unionized at all. Just five percent of all nurses belong to unions, and those that do are fairly evenly divided between the three major federations.
But the nurses' coordination, based initially in the Paris region, has to a large extent overcome this problem. The nurses' coordination is the most dynamic and militant of the various coordinations that have been set up by healthworkers, to the extent that, for the first time ever, government representatives have had talks with such an unofficial workers' body.
### Nurses' militancy infectious
The vigorous, expansive and democratic nature of the nurses' campaign presents the national union federations with a stark choice: either support the nurses in their struggle by demanding that the government include their coordination in negotiations, or ignore reality and leave this new — and representative — movement out in the cold.
The nurses' militancy is certainly infectious. Aside from being in the vanguard of the various categories of healthworkers fighting for better pay and conditions, the movement that has built up is threatening to snowball and inspire other sectors of workers in both the public and private sectors to fight against unemployment and austerity. On October 8, the nurses' coordination called for rolling 24-hour strike actions and a national demonstration in Paris on October 13. That will be a day to watch! *
Free-market sports