New Zealand nurses reject union-backed sellout, prepare nationwide strike
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) announced today that a majority of its 29,500 members in public hospitals had voted to reject the latest offer from District Health Boards (DHBs), backed by the NZNO. The union did not reveal the voting figures.
This highly significant vote paves the way for the first nationwide 24-hour strike since 1989. It is scheduled for Thursday, and involves nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants.
The union bureaucracy recommended the sellout agreement after cancelling a strike scheduled for July 5a flagrantly anti-democratic move that was widely denounced by nurses on Facebook. The offer, the fourth presented to NZNO members since late 2017, was virtually identical to an offer decisively rejected last month: a pay increase of 3 percent per annum for 2017-2019 and a grossly inadequate 2 percent increase in hospital staffing.
Last week NZNO desperately sought to promote the offer and echoed the Labour Party-NZ First-Greens coalition government's false statements that there was no more money available.
Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/10/nurs-j10.html