Fresh Series of Doctors' Strikes Hits Germany
June 26, 2006
Physicians at German public hospitals started their protest on Monday morning after the Marburger Bund -- Germany's largest doctors' union -- announced on Saturday that 97.1 percent of doctors at 700 rural and city hospitals voted in favor of the strike.
The union is fighting for better working conditions and higher pay for some 70,000 doctors. The head of the Marburger Bund union, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, said the walkouts were the result of "completely intolerable arrogance on the part of the employers."
Emergency services will be provided during the strike, according to Montgomery.
A different strike
Before the beginning of the strike, German Health Minister Ulla Schmidt urged the communal employers and the union to return to the negotiating table.
"The pay scale quarrels in public hospitals are not about surgeries and treatment that can be postponed," Schmidt said. "In hundreds of hospitals, they are about the everyday inpatient treatment of people."
Drawing a parallel to the strikes of university hospitals would be wrong, according to Schmidt.
"That is something different from the situation at university clinics," Schmidt said. "That needs to be clear to everybody. Because of this difference, a high degree of responsibility is demanded from everybody involved. Which is why we must do everything possible to find a way back to the negotiations."
An unprecedented avalanche
The German Association of Cities and Towns said that if the union managed to push through its demands it would create an "unprecedented avalanche of costs." More than half of local hospitals are in the red, it said.
In mid-June, after reaching a wage deal with authorities, doctors at university hospitals called off the most widespread series of strikes in their history which had obstructed health care for three months.
While university hospitals are funded by Germany's 16 regional states, local hospitals are largely subject to payment schemes set by public health insurance providers, which stipulate how much is received for each patient.
That pay scale increased by less than one percent this year.