The New South Wales (NSW) nurses union have overwhelmingly voted to strike over staffing and wage issues.
Thousands of nurses and midwives from the state’s public hospitals are expected to walk off the job for 24 hours on Feb. 15, leaving skeleton staff to care for the critically ill.
“What they’ve been through in the last two years has strengthened their determination to get this NSW government to understand that to give them hope for the future,” he said.
Holmes said nurses were burnt out and at breaking point and turned to industrial action as a last resort.
During the Delta and Omicron outbreaks, the state government assured the public that it had plans to ensure the loss of health staff caused by infected workers in isolation would not heavily affect the availability of services.
“Well, you can test them now and see what it’s like without the nurses at the bedside,” Holmes said.
He said nurses and midwives needed a commitment from the government to support proper staffing for every shift, particularly outside of a pandemic situation.
They also wanted their pay to give recognition to and reflect the “work that they undertake and the value that they add to the community.”
The union is calling for a “fair” pay raise, one higher than the 2.5 percent currently offered by the government.
However, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said the patient ratios the union was calling for weren’t effective, describing it as playing politics.
“The advice that I’ve received is that there is substantive challenges to that, and it hasn’t actually worked so well in other states,” he said. “Let’s not play politics. We don’t want to get back to the old union games.”
Perrottet called for reasonable, robust discussions with all unions to resolve the issues without industrial action.
“What I want is reasonable, robust discussions to get outcomes, not be in a situation where we see strikes over the course of 2022,” he said.
