NSW nurses and midwives strike for a 15 percent pay rise
Members of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives’ Association in public hospitals walked off the job on 10 September for the second time this year in our fight for a pay rise of 15 percent over one year.
Striking nurses and midwives were bused in from hospitals to a lively and angry rally at NSW Premier Chris Minns’ office in Kogarah in South Sydney, where we blocked the road for several hours, before moving on to another demonstration at the office of Education Minister and Deputy Premier Prue Car in western Sydney’s Parramatta.
The strike took place in spite of the Industrial Relations Commission’s ruling to ban it. Defying these rulings is now a routine necessity for the association—without defying these orders, we lose our collective power and our means to win.
We have been asked by the state government to shoulder the financial burden of improvements in conditions that were promised but have failed to materialise. In 2022, a series of strikes and rallies pressured the incoming Labor government to agree broadly to the demands of our campaign to increase staffing numbers and reduce and regulate the number of patients that a nurse could be assigned to on each shift.
This was a significant victory many years in the making, but for most nurses and midwives, these conditions seem further away than ever as hospitals impose local austerity measures to save costs. These measures mean that full-time equivalent positions are left unfilled, staffing gaps due to maternity and long-service leave are unfilled, and some staff have lost their jobs as rolling two-year contracts (which most of us are employed on) expire.
All of this is compounded by the sector’s inability to recruit and retain its nursing and midwifery workforce—why would anyone choose to work in this state when you can earn at least $10,000 more per year in Queensland or Victoria? Nurses and midwives cannot be produced from the ether: they must be trained and recruited, and the profound disrespect shown to this profession by successive state governments means that potential students and overseas recruits have little reason to consider NSW a good option.
We are paying 2024 bills with 2008 wages. We are paying exorbitant rent and mortgages, and many of us cannot even afford to live in the areas where we work.
But as bad as things are, they can always get worse. The dedication and good will of the nursing workforce can stretch to profound degrees to hold together a healthcare system teetering on the edge of disaster—just look at the state of the National Health Service in the UK. If we let it, the government will burn us out for the sake of its balanced books and assert that we’re being unreasonable by asking for more.
The state government has refused to concede to our demands and pay us what we are worth. We will win this fight only through the strength of our industrial power. We need to escalate further—now is the time for longer, more disruptive strikes, bed closures and work bans.
