Australia: Tens of thousands of public sector nurses in NSW walk out against Labor’s pay cap

More than 10,000 nurses and midwives protested angrily outside the New South Wales (NSW) Parliament in Sydney on Wednesday to demand higher pay, increased staffing and better conditions. NSW nurses and midwives are the lowest paid in Australia’s public health sector.

Part of the 10,000-strong march by striking nurses and midwives in Sydney, Australia, November 13, 2024

The demonstration was part of a 24-hour nationwide strike by 50,000 members of the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association (NSWNMA), the third industrial action in as many months. Hundreds also demonstrated in Armidale, Broken Hill, Coffs Harbour, Crookwell, Moruya, Lismore, Port Macquarie, Tweed and Taree.

The NSWNMA has called for a 15 per cent increase to be paid this year. Even if granted, this would not offset the skyrocketing cost of living, or make up for previous low-wage agreements between unions and governments, as well as a wage freeze the union approved in 2020.

The Minns government is refusing to lift its cost-cutting pay offer of 3.5 per cent for this year, with 3 per cent increases in 2025 and 2026. Amid soaring housing costs and ongoing increases to essentials, they would amount to another real pay cut. The government has threatened to go to formal arbitration when talks resume in the Labor Market Commission later this month.

Premier Minns told the media that a 15 per cent pay rise in the first year of a future deal was impossible and would force the government to backtrack on an earlier pledge, widely promoted during the last union election, to improve the ratio of nurses to patients . . In other words, the union’s wage demands must be met with even deeper attacks on working conditions.

While the striking nurses and midwives angrily rejected these threats – scores of protesters carried handmade placards condemning the government and highlighting the escalating crisis in the state’s public hospitals – NSWNMA officials are working desperately to contain and dispel nurses’ determination to fight.

Addressing the demonstration, officials stepped up their efforts to isolate and separate them from other public employees and the rest of the working class by claiming they were being discriminated against because they were part of a predominantly female workforce.

NSWNMA general secretary Shaye Candish told nurses they were fighting “structural and hidden” gender bias and that their low wages indicated “appalling disrespect” for women by the government.

NSWNMA General Secretary Shaye Candice addresses protesting nurses in Sydney on 13 November 2024

Candish’s claims of gender bias ignore the fact that there are 7,000 male nurses and midwives in the sector who face the same attack as their female colleagues. Likewise, all public sector employees in NSW – both male and female – are affected by Labor’s cost-cutting pay cap.

Candish cited Labor’s decision on Monday to give NSW police officers a 39 per cent pay rise, describing it as another example of gender bias. This showed, she said, that “there is one reality for male-dominated workforces and another for female-dominated workforces.”

These claims are false and reactionary. Labour’s rise in police pay had nothing to do with gender. Equating police with health workers, as the union and government tend to do, should be rejected with contempt by nurses and midwives. The police do not save lives, as health workers do. They are a key part of the capitalist state, dedicated to oppressing the poor and suppressing opposition, including from workers, which is why they have been rewarded with a pay rise.

Candish declared other public sector workers in NSW – members of health unions, transport staff, teachers and others – had won increased pay in new contracts without sacrificing conditions. “No other industry is expected to fund its resources out of the pockets of its workers,” she said.

This is simply false. Minn’s wage cap policies, like his counterparts across Australia, all involve the imposition of productivity gains, the elimination of hard-won terms or other cost-cutting measures negotiated and enforced by the unions.

And it is this decades-long, never-ending race to the bottom involving the NSWNMA and all other unions, which has created the disaster in public hospitals and the worsening assault on nurses’ and midwives’ pay and conditions.

NSWNMA deputy general secretary Michael Waites admitted the union had not raised the issue of a long-term pay commitment in its discussions with Minns ahead of the March 2023 state election.

Michael Waites, Nurses and Midwives Assistant General Secretary

Waites said the talks focused on staffing ratios as “the biggest issue” because “there was no cost of living crisis at the time. Even the RBA didn’t anticipate that.”

Waites is between the teeth. Contrary to his claim, the working class was hit hard by record price increases with inflation peaking at 7.8 percent in December 2022.

The cost of living crisis prompted a movement of public sector workers, including nurses and midwives, to hold mass strike meetings in 2022. The NSWNMA dismantled that movement and turned it into part of Labour’s state election campaign. It did so, in conditions where Minns was very clear that even nominal increases in public sector wages would be paid for by productivity gains.

So Waites and the NSWNMA bureaucrats are hoping that the workers have very bad memories and cannot remember what the union officials said more than two years ago.

With Labor in office at federal level, in NSW and most states and territories, the offensive against real wages has only deepened. According to the latest figures, workers have lost about 9 percent of their purchasing power nationally over the past three years – a historic cut in working-class living standards.

There was an obvious contradiction in the rally speeches. Waites, Candish and co. continued to praise the staffing quotas they negotiated with Minns, although they admitted that virtually nothing had changed in the public hospitals. In reality, emergency department quotas apply in only a handful of hospitals. Under conditions of huge staff shortages, caused by decades of government austerity and the low-wage regime, the quotas are meaningless because there are not enough workers to implement them.

Candish and Waites both screamed about how they weren’t going to back down and how angry they were at the government. For all the pantomime theatrics, they complained that it was Minns who did not want to negotiate and expressed their willingness to “negotiate”. Having already rejected, in the most anti-democratic way, calls from rank-and-file nurses for higher wage demands, NSWNMA officials will not hesitate to “compromise” on the 15 percent, as they have done time and time again.

None of the speakers mentioned the possibility of a united struggle by all health workers, or of turning to other public personnel in a joint struggle against the government.

Instead, with 10,000 angry members in front of them, union bureaucrats and their flunkies encouraged nurses and midwives to book appointments with their local MPs for a chat.

Wednesday’s 24-hour statewide strike showed once again that nurses and midwives want to fight. The first step in this struggle, however, is to recognize that they are in a political battle, not only with the Minn Labor government but with the trade union bureaucracy, which acts as its industrial police and makes its demands.

Nurses and midwives on strike in Sydney, Australia, November 13, 2024

To wage a real fight for their pay, jobs and conditions, nurses and midwives must take the current fight out of the hands of the NSWNMA bureaucracy. This requires new organizational forms, rank-and-file committees that operate independently of the trade union apparatuses and are democratically controlled by the workers themselves.

Nurses and midwives must discuss and promote a pay rise, staffing ratios, working hours and conditions that suit their needs and ensure best practice and safe conditions in all public health facilities. This should include an immediate 30 percent pay rise and the development of strikes and other forms of industrial action aimed at involving all other public health professionals and other parts of the state public sector to fight for it.

Such a struggle must be animated by an understanding that public health and the wages of those who work in these and other vital social services – education, transport, welfare – cannot be determined by what governments or big business deems affordable. We urge nurses, midwives and all health professionals to read and circulate copies of the Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee’s November 12 statement, discuss with your colleagues and contact us today to talk about how to develop a rank-and- file committee at your workplace.

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Australia: Tens of thousands of public sector nurses in NSW walk out against Labor’s pay cap

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