HARARE – Senior doctors, nurses and radiographers said on Friday their members would strike next week to protest at poor salaries and working conditions, the second walk-out since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
A last-ditch meeting between the Health Services Board (HSB) and the Zimbabwe Health Apex Council representing several unions failed to reach agreement on Friday.
In a letter to the HSB, unions said “having made numerous attempts to engage the employer with no success, we hereby notify your office of our state of incapacitation and the subsequent withdrawal of service by government health workers effective Monday, June 20, 2022.”
Unions separately wrote to major hospitals giving notice of their intention to strike.
“Our members will not be able to turn up for duty starting on Monday, June 20,” Zimbabwe Professional Nurses Union president Robert Chiduku said in a letter addressed to the Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals.
The government and health workers are at an impasse over pay, as inflation jumped to 131.7 percent in May, a grim echo of the hyperinflation that wiped out everyone’s savings a decade ago.
The last strike, in 2020, forced hospitals to turn away patients during the coronavirus pandemic.
The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nurses in Zimbabwe are paid Z$30,000 (US$79.37) and doctors Z$50,000 a month, the unions say.
Chiduku said the union had “combined forces with our sister unions. The mood is people are fed up. Our salaries are pathetic.”
Enock Dongo, head of the Zimbabwe Nurses Association (Zina), also signed the letter to the HSB which employs health workers.
In their letter, the workers listed several grievances including “the closure of negotiation space”; failure to adjust salaries to meet inflation; failure to review the grading system; failure to review allowances including on-call and night duty and the government’s failure to pay workers in foreign currency for donor-funded programmes.
A strike would further cripple a health sector already understaffed by nurses leaving to work in western countries.
Zimbabweans have been losing patience with President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, which has promised to end years of economic crisis that started under his predecessor Robert Mugabe. The government blames Western sanctions on some of its officials for the economic crisis. – Reuters
