Doctors’ pay struggle continues
Bargaining council talks aimed at settling the disagreement between public sector doctors and government over an occupational-specific dispensation (OSD) pay package are hanging by a thread as unions have rejected an offer from government.
‘Currently, what the employer is actually proposing as part of the salary adjustments is between 0.28% ‘ 5%. We’re having difficulties in dealing and understanding what it is they’re trying to fix if the figures are actually kept at such a very minimal level’, said Dr Bandile Hadebe, chairperson of the Junior Doctors’ Association of South Africa, an interest group of SAMA, the South African Medical Association.
‘It’s an insult to the concept of salary re-adjustments. You can’t say you’re going to adjust a situation and change it by a point of a percent. There’s nothing that’s changing’, Hadebe added.
He said the government’s 0.28% – 5% salary re-adjustment ‘excludes junior doctors, including interns and community service doctors’.
‘The broader picture around OSD is not just about salaries. It’s about recruitment and retainment, and it’s about career-pathing. Now the recruitment and the retainment is obviously being played as a joke, here, because you are not going to recruit anyone with the current junior salaries.
You cannot honestly sit and say you’re recruiting doctors in this country when somebody studies for six years and takes home R8 000 ‘ R9 000 and his cousin who starts studying two years later, graduates, works as an engineer and is taking home R25 000 with benefits. You cannot be saying you’re recruiting these people to the health industry.
So, one of the non-negotiables as we go forward as doctors is that OSD has to cover junior doctors’, he said, explaining why the salary adjustment programme must include junior doctors.
The national Department of Health refused to confirm or deny the offer it’s reported to have proposed.
‘I can’t be able to reveal that’, said Dr Percy Mahlati, Deputty Director-General for Human Resources.
‘It’s a subject of negotiation at the bargaining council. Let me tell you the danger of answering that question. The danger of that is that we’ve got negotiators sitting around the table. If I give you a figure that is very low, you’ll inflame the situation already. If I give you a figure that is very high, nurses will come up and say: ‘Why were we given such small amounts, but these ones are getting so much big amounts and all’?
Others coming will say: ‘But you gave others so much money. Why us this’? So, that is why these issues have to be addressed within the controlled environment of the bargaining council’, he continued, defending the secrecy.
But the situation is already inflamed. Doctors don’t see eye to eye in the approach to resolving the matter. A group of doctors has split away from the South African Medical Association (SAMA) and started an aggressive splinter organisation, called the United Doctors’ Forum (UDF). Just last week, the group walked out of the bargaining council talks where they were represented by SAMA and the Democratic Nurses’ Organisation of South Africa (DENOSA). Last month, the Forum disrupted services at a number of key hospitals in various provinces when it called on doctors to strike. If the impasse continues, more protest action is likely to unfold.
‘Given the current situation, a strike is inevitable. We should soon be announcing a date of a strike’, said Dr Rapitsi Malatji, spokesperson for the United Doctors’ Forum.
While the Forum is prepared to go on strike any day, SAMA has decided to see the bargaining council process to the end. But there are signs that it’s also losing patience with the slow pace at which the talks are moving.
‘We are just struggling to find out why we as doctors are being frustrated in the manner that we’re being frustrated’, said JUDASA’s Dr Bandile Hadebe.
‘We have endorsed and authorised the march that’s going to happen on the 29th of May, which, obviously, is a build-up to a bigger process.
We are hoping to submit a concise memorandum on the 29th speaking specifically to working conditions in the public sector, to the current situation around OSD and to a myriad of issues around factors in the private sector and the health system as a whole.
We will wait for the response of the Minister in regard to that particular march. But, obviously, you don’t start with the pickets; step up to a march, if you do not have a bigger plan of downing tools. If the figures from government as they stand were not to change, then, yes, there will be a stalemate’, he said.
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