Earlier this year, trade unions and the government, as employer, reached, as part of the OK21 agreement, a deal over nurses pay, under which they would receive a 5.02% pay increase over three years. Many nurses were dissatisfied, so the agreement went to mediation. When this was put to the vote, 66,7% — a majority of eligible nurses voted no to the new proposal. The nurses’ trade union, Dansk Sygeplejeråd, reported a historically high turnout, 74.4 percent.
The OK21 wage negotiations apply to both nurses and X-ray nurses. Among the X-ray nurses, two thirds of the members voted in favor of the mediation offer and are thus excluded from the strike.
The origin of the strike is the demand for higher salaries for nurses, which according to the union are 15–20 percent lower than the salaries in other comparable occupations with a corresponding level of education.
In Denmark, after the Civil Service Reform at the end of the 1960s employment in the public sector has been organized on a pay scale. Through this reform, typically female-dominated jobs, such as health care, were placed at a lower wage level than equivalent male-dominated occupations, according to the union.
“The nurses have lost patience”
The trade union explains that in the background to the no vote is the many years of starvation treatment of the entire healthcare system, which has led to increased work pressure and increased demands for flexibility from employees.
As Grete Christensen, chairperson of Dansk Sygeplejeråd and chief negotiator for nurses and X-ray nurses in OK21, says on their website:
“I see the no signal as a strong and unequivocal signal to both employers and Christiansborg, the Danish government, that the nurses have lost patience. Dissatisfaction with salaries has become too great. At the same time, after a year and a half of corona, nurses have had to run extra fast in an everyday life that was already characterized by a pressured work environment and inhuman stress. The glass was full. Now it is overflowing”.
Both the union’s national committee and its congress had recommended a yes vote to the mediation offer. However, but for now they have to give 100 percent support to the desire of members to go on strike, Grete Christensen points out:
“Even though the national committee and the congress had recommended a yes, we follow the members’ no with the utmost respect. In the Executive Board, we are now showing political leadership and joining the fight to put maximum pressure on employers and Christiansborg ”.
In Norway, too, nurses are currently on strike for higher salaries, together with other employees in the public sector, including teachers. Here, however, the government has stepped in and stopped the strike in the councils by creating a mandatory wage board, which in practice means that the state takes over the wage issue, according to the newspaper Vårdfokus. The Norwegian Nurses’ Association responded by stepping up the strike action in the hospitals.
That members are allowed to vote on their own agreements where the majority has the right to decide should be a matter of course also within the trade union movement in all countries.
All support to the nurses’ strike!
