Union plays politics with nurses in a risky strategy that could backfire

THE 1960s was the first time this country enjoyed prosperity since the foundation of the State, but that decade was marred by a series of strikes.

The current prosperity, on the other hand, has been relatively free of industrial unrest thanks largely to social partnership.

Over the years there have been a number of high-profile strikes in this country and abroad where the strike leaders seemed convinced they were holding the whip hand because society could not do without their services. It happened with the teachers and the train drivers in this country in this decade.

On August 3, 1981 the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation (PATCO) in the US announced a strike for better working conditions. They demanded a 32-hour work week.

President Ronald Reagan invoked the Taft-Harley Act which required the controllers to return to work for a 90-day cooling-off period. Only 1,200 of the more than 12,000 controllers did so. The union thought it could bring air traffic to a halt and force the administration to capitulate, but Reagan gave the employees a 48-hour ultimatum to return to work.

On August 5 he fired 11,359 striking controllers and banned them from other federal employment. They were replaced by an assortment of supervisors, staff and military controllers until permanent replacements could be trained.

This proved to be the most stunning defeat ever suffered by the unions in the US.

Reagan got away with it because public opinion was on his side and people resented the way the union had assumed it had a right to violate the law in its own interests. PATCO has not been heard of since.

Here at home, in October, 2000, the Association of Secondary Teachers (ASTI) threatened to close down some 620 secondary schools to further their 30% pay claim. This amounted to holding school children to ransom to advance a pay claim that had nothing to do with the existing rate of inflation.

If those claims were granted, it would have undermined social partnership and led to other claims that would inevitably fuel inflation and threaten the economy on which our growing prosperity was based. The ASTI general secretary actually stated at the time that teachers should have pitched a 60% pay claim.

If teachers had legitimate claims they should have been articulate enough to convince the public without resorting to such tactics. The Government allowed them to stage one-day strikes and draw their full salaries, which amounted to an extra day’s holiday for people who already enjoyed the most extensive paid holidays of any segment of society.

Three months later, ASTI threatened to disrupt the junior and leaving cert exams as part of a work-to-rule and refused to talk unless the Government capitulated. Not to be outdone, the primary teachers, through the INTO, called for up to 40% increases. Maybe the politicians had given lousy example in feathering their own nests, but the people elected them and could get rid of them. The threat to disrupt the exams was what one teacher described as their nuclear option — it was their power to hurt. But hurting the people they were dedicated to serving did not reflect the vocational ethos of most of the teachers, and the union gradually found itself like a train engine from which the carriages had been decoupled.

The final straw came at ASTI’s annual conference when the president of the National Parents’ Council (NPC) claimed that, having been invited to their dinner, she was insulted and intimidated by ASTI delegates and her council’s press officer made a formal complaint to the gardaí that a delegate had assaulted him.

Most ASTI members had the good sense to realise their union leaders had undermined themselves. The teachers fell back on the Government’s benchmarking offer and clipped ASTI’s wings.

Will the nurses have to learn the same lesson? Nursing and teaching are vocations as well as professions. Anybody who goes into teaching or nursing for the money only is inevitably going to be disappointed because if they don’t have the vocation, they are going to make lousy teachers or bad nurses and end up frustrated. We have probably all had the experience of a bad, frustrated teacher that we would have been better off without.

The work is not worth any amount of money unless those engaged in it have a vocation to the job. Those who do not have that vocation should find another job for everyone’s sake.

OVER the years the pay of nurses probably suffered because so many hospitals were run by nuns who led by example, effectively paid even less than the nurses but motivated by a true vocation to serve. Now highly-paid administrators have replaced the nuns at the top.

In comparison, the nurses certainly deserve more, but they should fight for it through benchmarking.

Bertie Ahern made a name for himself as a conciliator, but he took a strong stand against the teachers, emphasising how the benchmarking process was open to them. He has essentially adopted the same tactics with the nurses: “The nurses are looking for effectively a 10% increase for 40,000 nurses, and we’re in a national agreement with everybody and we just can’t give that”.

It was significant that none of the opposition parties supported the nurses’ demands. The nurses certainly deserve to be better paid that the pen-pushing bureaucrats in the HSE, but they are destroying their case by effectively threatening to hold the sick to ransom. It is their nuclear option, but if they hurt the sick they will be widely perceived as being unfit to be nurses and they will lose their public support.

Power without responsibility is always dangerous, but using power by exploiting the suffering of sick people is heinous.

It is not just coincidental that the nurses’ action is timed within a couple of months of a general election in which health policy will be a major issue?

The INO is using the nurses to play politics, and they are out of their depth.

According to the INO, the nurses were not looking for money to open the new maternity hospital in Cork recently. But they had sought up to €4,000 from the Labour Court and were rejected.

Then at the 11th hour, Liam Doran, the INO general secretary, asked for €1,000 for each of his members, while still maintaining they were not looking for money. He was fooling nobody but himself, and his bluff was called.

Now the nurses are looking for money, but they are not prepared to go through benchmarking.

They have a point in arguing there are already exceptions to benchmarking. This was highlighted yesterday by the demands of hospital consultants and others being paid well above the norm, but that is a case for insisting there should be no exceptions, not for scrapping the system.

Maybe the nurses, or their union representatives, think the Taoiseach and Health Minister Mary Harney will not have the courage to hold out with an election coming. All it will require is one poor granny or one unfortunate baby to die because of the strike.

People won’t blame the politicians or the bureaucrats because they don’t work in the hospitals. They will blame the nurses and this might well take the spotlight off the Government’s political failings.

Remember what Charlie said of Bertie: “He’s the best, the most skilful, the most devious and the most cunning of them all.”