Australia: More than 10,000 nurses and midwives on strike against Labor government budget cuts

More than 10,000 nurses and midwives demonstrated in NSW yesterday for a 24-hour strike against the Labor government’s wage cut offer. The strike follows a 12.5-hour strike on September 10.

Nurses and midwives gather in Hyde Park, Sydney, on September 24, 2024

The state Labor government, led by Premier Chris Minns, has offered health workers, along with most other public sector employees, a nominal pay rise of just 9.5 per cent over three years, below the current official inflation rate of 3.8 per cent, itself a significant underestimation of the soaring cost of living.

The NSW Nurses and Midwives Association (NSWNMA) has put forward a demand for a 15 per cent pay rise this year, which is wholly inadequate to offset previous cuts imposed in agreements between the unions and the government.

The main protest, which took place outside the NSW Parliament on Macquarie Street in Sydney, was attended by at least 9,000 nurses and midwives, according to organisers. Many had travelled several hours to take part, including a group from Manning Base Hospital in Taree, more than 300 kilometres to the north.

It was by far the largest gathering of NSW health workers since mass strikes in early 2022 against the then Liberal-National state government.

The turnout reflects the growing hostility of nurses and midwives to the Labor government, which is seeking to cut real wages, even as working conditions in the public health system become increasingly difficult. At the Sydney rally, striking nurses and midwives spoke with World Socialist Website journalists on the worsening crisis in state hospitals.

The anger and frustration of nurses and midwives is part of a broader rise in animosity towards the Labor Party. At state and federal level, Labor governments are waging the worst attack on working-class living standards in decades, while pouring vast resources into the military as part of a policy of global conflict.

This is what the Health Workers Committee warned about during the mass strikes of 2022. The NSWNMA betrayed this struggle, by imposing real wage cuts and insisting that the election of a state Labor government would improve nurses’ wages and conditions. This was a deliberate fraud, perpetrated by a NSWNMA bureaucracy that operates as a partner to the big business Labor government.

As the lies of NSWNMA officials are increasingly exposed, they are trying to cover their tracks. They have made limited criticisms of the Minns government, with Secretary Shaye Candish telling the rally, for example: “This government promised reform, promised hope. But it’s all been a sham.”

In fact, Minns expressed his hostility to the 2022 strikes as they were taking place and promised that his government would demonstrate fiscal responsibility. He explicitly stated that even nominal wage increases would be financed through “productivity” gains, i.e. increased exploitation and worsening working conditions, in the context of an already massive crisis in the public health system.

The half-hearted and hypocritical criticism of the NSWNMA is now aimed at obscuring the culpability of the union leaders and blocking any real fight against the Labor government.

This is why the union is suddenly claiming that the real reason nurses’ wages are under threat is misogyny directed at a predominantly female workforce. This promotion of an upper-middle-class feminist politics is an exercise in diversion and division. Its role is to mask the fundamental division in society into classes, between working people suffering from a massive cost of living crisis, growing poverty and services in crisis, and an ultra-rich elite represented by the Labour Party and the union bureaucracy itself.

The false feminist line is being used to balkanise workers within the profession itself. While 86% of nurses and midwives are women, that means there are still around 7,000 nurses and midwives in the NSW public sector who are subject to exactly the same attacks as their female colleagues. In public health more broadly, thousands of men who work alongside nurses and midwives every day are also facing another real pay cut from the state Labor government.

This dividing line was made clear by the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Michele O’Neil, who said: “The men of Macquarie Street are not listening to the women of this powerful union.”

O’Neil did not mention the word “Labor” once in her speech, referring instead vaguely to the “New South Wales government”. That’s because she is a Labor Party agent attacking workers’ wages.

O’Neil and other ACTU leaders were involved in a major attack on workers’ rights just months before it was presented to the nurses. The ACTU collaborated with Labor to place the construction division of the Construction, Forestry and Marine Employees Union (CFMEU) under state administration, a form of de facto dictatorship.

This has nothing to do with unverified and unproven allegations of corruption. It was an operation involving the Labor government, property developers and the ACTU to discipline a militant section of the working class and create the conditions for wage cuts in the construction sector, as is more or less openly admitted in the financial press.

O’Neil has not said a word about this, nor have his hosts in the NSWNMA bureaucracy. Their promotion of O’Neil is an endorsement of the attack on the construction workers. It underlines the sheer ostentatious nature of their criticism of the Labor government.

The attack on the CFMEU also refutes the nurses’ union’s gender politics. O’Neil and ACTU secretary Sally McManus are women. They have played a key role in a major government and employer attack on a section of the workforce that happens to be “predominantly male”. Whatever their gender, O’Neil and McManus, like Candish, are representatives of a well-heeled bureaucracy that collaborates with governments and corporations against the workers they falsely claim to represent.

NSWNMA Assistant Secretary Michael Whaites decided that the best way to promote the union’s gender position was to simply lie. Without providing any evidence, and in defiance of all evidence and objective reality, Whaites claimed that women workers in male-dominated sectors were receiving significant pay rises. He said: “The reason it (the gender pay gap) is getting worse is because male-dominated unions are getting pay rises that you’re not getting. (…) When you’re being offered 3% below inflation, men are leaving us behind and it’s this Labor government that’s orchestrating it.”

As well as ignoring the attack on the CFMEU while standing alongside someone who helped to perpetrate it, this was particularly absurd in the context of Whaites’ reference moments earlier to “our friends in the Rail, Tram and Bus Union” – the rail workers who are fighting the same government pay cut offer as nurses.

The rally highlighted the NSWNMA bureaucracy’s plans to end any struggle by nurses. O’Neil’s presence was a warning in itself. ACTU officials are invariably summoned when the bureaucracy is preparing a sellout deal with governments and employers.

Whaites’ comments indicated a mechanism the bureaucracy could use, saying: “We have a government that is going to sit back and let the Industrial Relations Commission sort this out for them.”

Unlike in previous years, the NSWNMA bureaucracy has not been able to quietly back down from members’ wage demands. This means that it may not be possible for the union to claim victory on the basis of minor concessions and promises as it has done in the past. Whaites is planting the seeds of an alternative outcome, in which the state’s industrial tribunals would impose the will of the Labor government despite opposition from the NSWNMA bureaucracy.

At the same time, the NSWNMA is seeking to distract nurses by making plaintive appeals to the government and vaguely suggesting that future elections could solve the problems. Candish said there was a need to “appeal to members of parliament”, particularly “women in marginal seats”. This is an even more obviously self-defeating prospect than the union’s call for a Labor government in 2022.

Nurses must draw certain conclusions. The role of the NSWNMA leaders in imposing past betrayals and isolating the current struggle is not a mistake. It expresses the fact that the union bureaucracy is a privileged layer, tied to employers and government, and hostile to any genuine struggle for improved wages and working conditions.

Nurses and midwives must take matters into their own hands. This means creating grassroots committees, politically and organizationally independent of any union, in every hospital and health facility. These committees will enable them to formulate demands based on their real needs, not on what governments or union bureaucrats consider “reasonable,” and a plan of action to fight for them.

This struggle must be based on an understanding of what they are really facing: a generalised attack on the working class, led by Labour governments. This means a counter-offensive must involve workers in all sectors.

Through a network of rank-and-file committees, nurses and midwives can connect with other sectors of workers, starting with other health, public sector and NSW railway workers. In direct opposition to union-imposed isolation, this must include an appeal to the tens of thousands of construction workers who have mobilised in recent weeks against the Labor government’s attacks.

This will provide the basis for a unified political and industrial struggle against labor, unions and the capitalist profit system itself, which is totally incompatible with the needs of ordinary people, including access to high-quality public health care, with decent pay and conditions for workers.