Eleven thousand striking hospital nurses voted Sunday evening to continue their week-long walkout after rejecting a compromise proposal by the government.
The strikers insisted that the government and Histadrut begin immediately to negotiate all of their demands which now include wage hikes, before they return to their jobs. The government had agreed earlier to consider demands for additional staff to ease the nurses’ work load.
Last week, the strikers won recognition of their independent union as a separate bargaining agent. They went on strike June 23 over that issue, saying at the time that wages were not a consideration. But apparently it became one after the Health Ministry issued emergency regulations last Thursday, ordering the nurses back to work on penalty of two years imprisonment or a $1,600 fine.
The order was defied and nurses who had been manning skeleton staffs at hospitals joined the walkout. The jail threat could not be implemented because there is no space to incarcerate 11,000 female and male nurses.
The Finance Ministry and Histadrut agreed Sunday that separate wage demands could not be considered from any single sector of the economy because they would destroy the basis for new national labor contracts with new wage scales.
In hospitals, meanwhile, half the patients have been sent home and the others doubled up in a few wards where only a single nurse was on duty, or in some cases, none. Doctors, trying to stand in for the absent nurses, have warned repeatedly that the health of many patients is in jeopardy.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
