Health Worker Strikes: What Can the Global Health Community Do to Help?
Have you noticed the large number of health worker strikes happening all over the world—in Sudan, Israel, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Spain, Montenegro, the Canary Islands, Australia, Argentina, and other places? As I read the news the past few weeks, I started thinking about the impact these strikes have on the people in need of care as well as the intrinsic right of any worker to fight for fair treatment, wages, and working conditions.
Strikes aren’t always a simple matter of salary, but in most recent examples I’ve read about, money was the core cause. While we can’t pretend that strikes by health workers don’t put innocent lives at risk, health care providers are still entitled to the same rights as other workers. Many health workers have poorly paid jobs with inadequate resources, the threat of violence, and a high risk of infection from HIV or other infectious diseases. The health and well-being of any country’s people depends on these workers, so it is difficult to understand why countries would risk a strike rather than do everything they can to provide adequate salaries, or in some cases even a basic living wage.
On the other hand, it is hard to bear the idea that a child in need of care for a life-threatening condition would be denied services due to a strike. If this happens, who bears the burden of responsibility: the health workers who have a moral obligation to provide care for those that depend on them, or the government whose policies or practices deny fair pay and basic rights to people who provide these critical services? It is a complex ethical situation where each side is both right and wrong, but with some strikes lasting months, it is not something we can afford to ignore. So what do we do about it?
There are many documents outlining standards of health workers’ and patients’ rights, but none seem to outline negotiation protocols or advocacy efforts that could ameliorate these conflicts. Perhaps international negotiation standards that could be freely adopted would help, in similar fashion as the code of practice for ethical recruitment of health workers produced by the World Health Organization. It is important to establish criteria for reasonable demands and a good-faith commitment from both sides to resolve the issues before a strike becomes the problem of the innocent people in need of care, who ultimately are the victims of any health worker strike.
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Photo by Jennifer Solomon
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