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.

A NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association member

NSW nurses and midwives strike for a 15 percent pay rise

Nurses and midwives in New South Wales have rejected the state government’s insulting offer of a 3 percent pay rise in a combative, all-membership meeting at Sydney’s Town Hall. 
The union leaders proposed a motion at the meeting that committed to continuing the industrial action campaign for safe nurse-to-patient ratios, but capitulated to the state government on the question of pay. The union’s original pay claim was for 4.75 percent. At the union meeting, officials argued to accept the Liberal state government’s 3 percent offer. This is well below the 5.1 percent inflation rate which is projected to continue to rise. The offer is a pay cut and comes off the back of years of public sector wage freezes.
Socialist nurses Nathanial Mitchell and Declan Maher moved an amendment to the motion to reject the 3 percent pay offer, and to instead fight for an above-inflation pay rise of at least 7 percent. They argued, along with other supporters, that the 3 percent offer is totally inadequate for nurses and midwives who have carried the burden of the pandemic and are facing significant cost of living pressures.
The amendment was heavily contested. Some, including the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives’ Association (NSWNMA) General Secretary Brett Holmes, argued that to reject the 3 percent offer risks the government coming back with an offer of 0. But nurses have rejected paltry pay offers before—we rejected the 1.04 percent offer in 2012, and the government was forced back to the bargaining table. 
When put to a vote, the amendment won 522 to 513 votes, despite the vocal opposition of many of the union’s leaders.
The meeting took place on the third day of state-wide strike action organised by the NSWNMA this year. Members from 80 hospitals voted to strike for varying amounts of time to attend the meeting. Along with the debate and vote on raising the pay claim, many nurses voiced their support for other unions who have recently been on strike and argued for joint action with other public sector unions.
The NSWNMA, as the largest union in the state, should set the standard for the current wave of public sector strikes. The inflation shock has only exacerbated trends that have been in play for the last couple of decades—that the bosses get a larger share of the profit, while workers receive less and union activism declines. 
If the state government could have its way, the cost of the crisis would come directly from the pockets of the same nurses, midwives, teachers, public transport workers and all other public sector workers who kept the state running during months of lockdowns. Only a combative and determined trade union movement can reverse this trend, and it won’t do it by lowballing on pay. 
This victory sets an important precedent for unions across NSW, and across Australia. The union movement needs to be more ambitious, more militant and more disruptive. The victory of the 7 percent pay rise vote proves that there is an appetite for this. If one union wins a real pay rise, it can give confidence to workers in other industries to demand more. If we combine our efforts and strike together, we can effectively shut the state down and force the government to meet our demands. 
Despite arguing against raising the pay claim, at a press conference after the members meeting Holmes told the media: “Nurses today have clearly said that 3 percent is inadequate and they think that next year’s offer of 3.5 and expecting them to come up with more productivity, to get more blood sweat and tears out of nurses and midwives is a joke and a farce”. 
It is now up to union activists to return to their local branches and push for further state-wide action to bust the NSW Government’s pay cap and win a real pay rise, along with nurse-to-patient ratios.

NSW nurses reject pay cut

Members of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives’ Association (NSWNMA) will strike tomorrow, less than two months since our first state-wide strike in a decade. Most of the more than 160 branches that voted to strike have pledged to walk out for 24 hours, an escalation from February’s strike, when only a few hospitals committed to a whole-day action.
We are committed to fighting for pay and conditions in health care, and are serious about challenging the state government’s agenda to make workers’ pay for the crises that they are responsible for. The Berejiklian and Perrottet governments had more than a year to prepare the healthcare system for the waves of COVID-19 that began in 2021. Yet they failed to meaningfully increase staffing levels, they failed to ensure safe nurse-to-patient ratios, and they failed to adequately compensate nurses, midwives and other healthcare staff for working themselves to exhaustion to keep the healthcare system running. 
We are proud to be part of the fightback against the state government by public sector workers. With inflation forecast to rise to more than 4 percent and the government still crying poor to justify its wage caps and insulting pay offers, we have more reason to fight than ever. 
We have been inspired by the impressive state-wide teachers’ strike in December and the ongoing actions by the train drivers and staff in the Rail Tram and Bus Union. But if we want to push back the government’s entire anti-working-class agenda, we need to strike more and strike together. That’s why nurses and midwives in the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Branch passed the following motion:
“RPA Branch of the NSWNMA calls on the rest of the public sector union to join us in industrial action. We have had enough of the attacks from the NSW government. We are stronger together.”
The other public sector unions (and all other unions for that matter) need to start taking the lead of the NSWNMA and ramp up their campaigns of strike action, not only in defiance of their employers and the government, but in defiance of bosses’ courts like the Industrial Relations Commission, which will likely declare the upcoming strike illegal, like it did in February. It is a rare sight to see a union defy the IRC or the Fair Work Commission and go ahead with an illegal strike, so the NSWNMA’s continued defiance should be an example for the whole movement to follow. 
Anti-union laws have been defeated by strikes before, like in the NSW general strike of 1969, which freed jailed tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea and rendered anti-strike laws practically useless. If we want to break the power of these bodies that contribute to making Australia’s industrial relations laws among the most hostile to workers in the developed world, we need to follow that example and strike against them.
We need a strong, independent union movement that will continue to use its industrial power, even if Labor forms government after next year’s state election. After all, it’s not just hospitals in NSW that are in crisis—this is a nationwide problem. Concessions offered to health workers by Daniel Andrews in Victoria are not sufficient to compensate for appalling conditions or to stem the mass exodus of workers from the profession. We need a socialist presence in the union movement that orients not to parliament, but to the workplaces, the classrooms and the hospital wards.
All unionists should join the public rally at 10am tomorrow (Thursday 31 March), Queens Square on Macquarie Street. Help us fight the Perrottet government.

NSW nurses and midwives strike again

Members of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives’ Association at Westmead Hospital protested last Wednesday to demand that the Perrottet government address the crisis in the state’s hospitals. 
Nurses and midwives demonstrated outside the hospital during their lunch break, holding signs demanding that the premier spend a day in the shoes of hospital staff, who are overworked and, like the healthcare system, at breaking point.
“The mood is mostly that of exhaustion”, Skip Blofield, the union’s Westmead branch secretary and organiser of the action, told Red Flag. “Because nurses are being deployed out of their specialties just to try to fill out the numbers on the wards, there’s an insane amount of people out of their depth.
“People are working overtime on the regular, on some wards taking seven, eight or nine patients at once. ICU must be, by a matter of clinical necessity, one nurse to one patient, but even that cannot be guaranteed. Theatre staff, thanks to lack of numbers on nights, have been working up to twenty hours.”
Despite the horrific conditions, the NSW government has refused to enact even basic measures to stem the attrition of healthcare staff, such as the creation of a COVID allowance to compensate nurses for working in dangerous conditions. Instead, it has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jan/03/covid-positive-nurses-are-working-in-nsw-hospitals-due-to-severe-staffing-shortages">sent COVID-positive staff to work in the wards</a> and cancelled the leave of those who haven’t had a break since the pandemic began.
Midway through last year, nurses and midwives walked off the job to fight against the public sector pay freeze and to demand safe nurse-to-patient ratios at dozens of hospitals across the state, including at large metropolitan hospitals such as Royal Prince Alfred, Liverpool and Westmead. 
The wave of strikes was cut short by the Delta outbreak, and the crisis in the hospitals has become only more acute.
“The Association should take advantage of the disenfranchisement and frustration of its membership and coordinate a wider action”, Blofield said. “There is an angry membership, and they elected their leaders, they should expect to see leadership from them and leadership in these conditions is bold and unambiguous calls to action.”

Nurses and midwives protest against appalling conditions at Westmead Hospital

We’re being told that we have to live with the virus. But the people telling us this are doing, and have done, next to nothing to prepare our health system for the consequences.
We are now more than eighteen months into the pandemic, and very little has been done by governments to improve the public health system and to prepare public hospitals for outbreaks. Now we are told that we should essentially let it rip once we get to vaccination levels that have proven to be thoroughly inadequate in other countries.
Scott Morrison, Gladys Berejiklian and Daniel Andrews all talk about “living with COVID” and have committed to the Doherty Institute’s modelling, which suggests relaxing border controls when 70 percent of over 16-year-olds are vaccinated, and largely abandoning lockdowns after 80 percent are vaccinated. This is a reckless, pro-business approach that will lead to many more deaths.
In response to this, both the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) and the Australian Medical Association (AMA) have publicly criticised the roadmap. The ANMF is calling for vaccination targets to include everybody, not just the deceptive “over 16” number. They are also calling for research and modelling into the effects of the Delta variant on children, who are being completely ignored in the current roadmap.
The AMA, for its part, is urgently sounding the alarm regarding hospital capacity and funding. “Even pre-COVID, emergency departments were full, ambulances ramped, and waiting times for elective surgery were too long”, AMA President Omar Khorshid said in a letter to to the prime minister, state premiers and chief ministers. “The AMA is calling for national cabinet to urgently commit the necessary funding to prepare our hospitals.”
The reality is that governments (Labor and Liberal, state and federal) neglect healthcare. And it’s something they’ve done for too long. They know that the system is in crisis, and they’ve known it for years. It’s not a secret.
If politicians want us to “live with COVID”, rather than die from it, they need to massively increase funding to the public healthcare system. Give us hospitals with adequate ventilation and ample intensive care capacity. Give us all of the tools that we are asking for to fight COVID. And pay healthcare workers the danger money that we deserve.
This is an urgent task. It always has been but is now more than ever. And it matters far beyond the next few months or years. 
There has been much talk among epidemiologists and virologists in recent decades about the likelihood of more pandemics in the twenty-first century. The threat has grown with increasing urbanisation, international travel and especially the advent of industrial-scale animal farming.
The close proximity of animals in industrial farms, and the constant back and forth of viral transmission makes it inevitable that viruses will mutate and jump into human populations.
In fact, this has already happened on several occasions. Once in 2009-10, with the swine flu pandemic that killed <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates.htm">between 150,000 and 575,000 people globally</a>. And several times with smaller bird flu outbreaks from the mid-1990s until 2019. It is the threat of the latter that has epidemiologists most worried.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu, for example, has a mortality rate approaching 60 percent in humans. Luckily, it is not very contagious, and no outbreak has ever surpassed 400 cases. However, in 2013, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted laboratory experiments showing that it was theoretically possible for H5N1 to mutate “naturally” into a highly contagious airborne pathogen. And all of the preconditions that could facilitate this mutation have only since compounded. This is but one example of a potential pandemic threat, among many.
There is also the impact of climate change. A 2010 article in the journal Nature, “<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09575">Impacts of biodiversity on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases</a>”, argues:
“In recent years, a consistent picture has emerged—biodiversity loss tends to increase pathogen transmission and disease incidence ... [C]onnections between biodiversity and disease are now sufficiently clear to increase the urgency of local, regional, and global efforts to preserve natural ecosystems and the biodiversity they contain.”
But since 2010, there has been very little effort to “preserve natural ecosystems”. Quite the opposite. We are arguably entering into a period where pandemics could become more frequent and more dangerous. In light of all this, we need to set the bar high with our response to COVID.
When the HIV/AIDS pandemic started tearing through the United States in the 1980s, the Reagan administration ignored it for years, unbothered by the fact that it seemed to be affecting only gay men and people in Africa. It took years of activism by groups such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) before the government and medical researchers put any money into developing treatments.
This activist movement eventually led to the development of antiretroviral drugs, which have undoubtedly saved millions of lives. It took protest, disruption and a huge amount of public pressure and shame for governments and the pharmaceutical industry to take the AIDS pandemic seriously. Larry Kramer, one of the organisers of ACT UP said it best:
“The government didn’t get us the drugs. No one else got us the drugs. We, ACT UP, got those drugs out there. It is the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim.”
COVID, just like the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, has highlighted the reality, yet again, that the realm of public health is a fiercely contested political space.
So we need to fight for better health care—much better health care. More research, more funding, permanent contact tracing operations, better hospitals and more staff. But also a range of healthcare measures in society more generally, including proper ventilation systems in workplaces and schools, for example.
In fact, there should be contact tracing efforts for all contagious diseases. Why should we try to prevent only as many COVID deaths as possible? We should also try to reduce as much as possible deaths from all transmissible diseases.
All of these things take money and funding. But it is a question of priorities. Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced last June that the government would spend an extra $270 billion on the military over the next ten years.
Yet we watch our hospital system bursting at the seams, wondering what facilities we could have with an extra $270 billion. As healthcare workers prepare for months and maybe even years of increased stress, the likelihood of mass infection of hospital staff, and workloads with massive backlogs, we can’t give in to the idea that any of this is normal and inevitable. It is not. A better healthcare system is entirely possible and worth fighting for.

If we have to live with COVID, why is the health system not being prepared?

The coronavirus outbreak tearing through Sydney and now regional New South Wales is testing the public healthcare system like nothing before it. Yesterday, the Australian Medical Association said that the public health system can’t manage the increasing caseloads. 
At my hospital in Sydney, there has been a complete upending of normal operations. Entire public wards have been moved into the private hospital, the intensive care unit has been expanded into the recovery unit, and entire floors have been turned into COVID-only wards. Nurses trained in anaesthetics are being given crash-courses in intensive care nursing; theatre nurses with little to no ward experience are being sent to look after geriatric COVID patients.
The hospital was not prepared for this outbreak. COVID patients are being transported in elevators and corridors that are used by the public—who are not wearing protective N95 masks—with only five or ten minutes between transports to allow for air circulation. This is super dodgy. It feels like it will be only a matter of time before patients and staff are infected, as happened at Liverpool Hospital. My hospital—indeed, all hospitals—are totally ill-equipped to deal with an outbreak of an airborne virus. A Victorian Department of Health report found that, during Melbourne’s second wave last year, 277 hospital patients caught the virus. Of those, 85 people died. Any hospital with a significant number of COVID patients is unsafe for unvaccinated people right now.
Even before this outbreak, the situation in hospitals was dire. Emergency departments were shockingly crowded and nurses were under great stress. The weight of responsibility for a patient’s health and the time-critical nature of disease and pain constantly collides with a system that is underfunded, under-resourced, understaffed and bed-blocked. It is incredibly frustrating to work in such an environment. Feeling like you can’t help people because you don’t have the time or resources is awful.
Management expects us to be perfect workers, to make no mistakes, to document every single thing, to answer all the call bells and telephones, to meet KPIs and to do all of our compulsory education in our own time. This leaves many nurses blaming themselves for the systemic problems. It’s ironic that hospitals, which are supposed to be places of healing, are the sites of such stress, anxiety and physical and emotional strain for the people who work in them. (It’s because of this that the nurses’ union, the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association, was already campaigning to improve staffing levels, pay and working conditions. The campaign has been put on hold while we battle the virus.) 
COVID coming on top of this situation poses not only a serious risk to anyone who may catch the virus, but also to those admitted to hospitals for other reasons (there are some 3 million admissions per year in New South Wales). The state has just under 600 intensive care beds, mostly in metropolitan Sydney. Many regional hospitals are not capable of dealing with a surge in intensive care patients. Often, very ill patients in regional hospitals or patients requiring major surgery are transported to the closest major hospital. In most cases, that is Sydney. It is unclear what would happen if covid were to take hold in regional NSW. Where will the staff come from to run the intensive care units? ICU-trained doctors and nurses don’t just fall from the sky. They take years to train properly. 
The coming weeks and months could be an unfolding crisis for the New South Wales healthcare system. Beyond the death toll, which is the main thing that the media reports, there will be the hidden toll. There will be thousands of people languishing in pain and disability because their surgeries have been cancelled. There will be the essential and potentially life-saving diagnostic procedures cancelled—leading to late diagnoses, and further preventable deaths. There will be the immeasurable toll of “long COVID” on hundreds of people. And then, if we manage to keep things relatively under control, there will be all of the catching up work.
One positive from the current outbreak is that far fewer people are dying than during Melbourne’s second wave. This is due to the high number of older people who have been vaccinated. Just one dose of any vaccine protects greatly against severe illness.
However, the Berejiklian government wants to gamble with our lives by easing restrictions once six million doses have been administered. To be clear, six million is a random number, chosen because it sounds big and is achievable even with the limited supply of vaccines. The population of New South Wales is eight million, and people require two doses, meaning that a 90 percent vaccination rate—which many epidemiologists are saying is needed for something approximating herd immunity against Delta—will require more than 14 million shots. Six million is a dangerously low target.
Eventually, restrictions will have to be eased, as it is widely believed that COVID is now endemic. Almost every epidemiologist acknowledges this. But easing restrictions when people have not even had a chance to be fully vaccinated is criminal. It is handing out death sentences to people, in the interests of business owners who want to begin trading as soon as possible. And it will likely push an already overloaded health system further into crisis.
The blame for this current outbreak, and the resulting death and damage to lives should be laid squarely at the feet of the Berejiklian government. For its refusal to follow the health advice. For its devotion to the interests of business. And for its years-long neglect of the public healthcare system and its workers.

NSW nurses and midwives strike for a 15 percent pay rise

NSW nurses reject pay cut

NSW nurses and midwives strike again

Nurses and midwives protest against appalling conditions at Westmead Hospital

If we have to live with COVID, why is the health system not being prepared?

I’m a public hospital nurse in Sydney—the system is at breaking point

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