We believe that most Jamaicans will be sympathetic to the island's nurses in their call for higher salaries and their ambition for an improved standard of living. That, after all, is the ambition of all us.
Where most Jamaicans, as we are, will be at odds with the nurses, is their approach to the campaign for better wages and whether the Government can, as the nurses insist that it does, afford to pay. Unfortunately, we have not heard from the Nurses' Association of Jamaica (NAJ) or its energetic, and increasingly media-savvy president, Edith Allwood-Anderson, the kind of constructive analysis that would convince us of the availability of the resources. Rather, their debate has been driven primarily by emotion.
Earlier this year most trade unions signed an agreement with the Government, negotiated by the umbrella Jamaica Confederation Trade Unions, that caps the growth in the Government wage fund 20 per cent over the next two fiscal years. Under this regime, aimed at allowing the administration to reduce the fiscal deficit and balance the budget, salary to individual bargaining units would range between 13 per cent and 27 per cent.
However, the nurses, like the teachers' union, balked at the agreement, complained that they played no role in its negotiation and pulled out of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that commits the Government to, among other things, keeping single-digit inflation, improving public sector efficiency and generating economic growth. Mrs. Allwood-Anderson is now demanding pay hikes of 80 per cent in the first year and half that amount in year two. The Government has offered a maximum of 24 per cent over the two years. In other words, the gap between the two positions is wide.
The response of the NAJ has been a series of sickouts or what Mrs. Allwood-Anderson calls a public education campaign. What they really are are very sheer fig leaves attempting to shield strikes, which, in the event, are illegal by nurses who fall under the listing of essential services in The Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act. So hospitals have been understaffed, services reduced and, in some cases, patients told to vacate the institutions.
This matter has been sent to the Labour Ministry for conciliation, in keeping with the labour relations grievance mechanism that was already breached by the NAJ. Rather than giving the system a chance to work, Mrs. Allwood-Anderson was insisting on the intervention of the Prime Minister, as if Mrs. Simpson Miller would easily conjure up the cash with which to meet the demand of the nurses. After another two-day protest, the nurses appear to have been persuaded to follow the orthodox route of Ministry of Labour conciliation, which is the sensible thing to do.
It is true that the best and best-trained Jamaican nurses are in demand in the United States where they command salaries much higher than can be afforded by Jamaica and other developing countries and what is paid to many senior executives here. But it is simplistic and naïve to place the matter of affordability only in the context of corruption and waste in Government, ignoring the larger economic picture, to which the MoU concedes, as well as the fact that over the past dozen years or so, the wages of public servants have grown much faster than the rate of inflation.
The case of the nurses can't be made purely on the basis of emotion.
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DO NOT NECESSARILY RELECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
