Health sector unions have endorsed Australian government’s “let it rip” policies, aiding and abetting this socially criminal assault on public health and the disastrous increase in patients catching COVID-19 while in hospital.
The NSWNMA letter presents a proposed real wage cut as a step forward, demonstrating that nurses are in struggle, not against management but the union as well.
The Industrial Relations Commission threat is in line with a broader assault, spearheaded by Labor and the unions, on the basic rights of workers to oppose attacks on their jobs, wages and conditions.
The determination of nurses to fight is running up against a union bureaucracy that is doing everything possible to wrap up the dispute and ram through a sell-out deal.
The strike follows an overwhelming rejection, by 84 percent of nurses, of the state Labor government’s offer of a 3 percent wage “increase” and a nurse-to-patient ratio model that would not be implemented for another two years.