BICOM

A strike by Israel’s nurses entered its tenth day this morning after a Tel Aviv Labour Court rejected a request by the state to order the nurses back to work.

Protesting low wages and a lack of manpower, the nurses began taking industrial action last week. However, they stepped up the level of protest yesterday when nurses walked off wards where lives would not be put at risk from 9am until 1pm. The nurses are already working according to a limited weekend schedule. As a result, thousands of elective operations have been postponed and there is a significant backlog in vaccinations at schools and well-baby clinics.

Yesterday’s walkout was prompted by a breakdown in talks between the nurses’ union and the Ministry of Finance on Monday night. Union representatives walked out of the discussions after senior ministry officials sent junior representatives to conduct negotiations.

Ilana Cohen, chairwoman of the National Association of Nurses said, “At a time when the nurses are collapsing under the workload and patients’ lives are in danger because of the shortage of nurses, the treasury has decided to play for time and not conduct continuous and intensive negotiations as dictated by the national emergency.”

The ministry responded to the intensifying of industrial action by appealing to the courts to issue a back-to-work order against the nurses. However, the Tel Aviv Labour Court last night rejected the request. Judge Efrat Laxer called on the ministry to show greater flexibility in resolving the crisis. As a result, there appears to be no immediate end in sight to the dispute.

Ofer Eini, chairman of the Histadrut, Israel’s labour federation, has called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get involved immediately to help resolve the matter, but so far the PM has refrained from doing so.