- The Guardian
- Issue #2117
That’s one of the slogans held up at a recent nurses and midwives’ demo. Nurses have had enough in NSW. They’re out on strike for a 15 per cent pay increase after a decade of pay suppression. NSW Premier Minns says the state can’t afford more. Nurses are leaving in droves for neighbouring states with higher wages. Minns seems to think the people of NSW can get by with just the nurses who can’t move to Victoria or Queensland.
Capitalism pretends it’s a meritocracy, where the people who deserve more get more. The reality is that people inherit vast sums without doing anything for them, and fail upwards by knowing the right people despite not doing good work. Unearned wealth like that of Gina Rinehart is protected like a baby chicken that’s just been given to a small child.
On the other hand, tough and important jobs like nursing don’t get properly paid, despite nurses and other workers having infinitely more merit than someone who’s inherited more than a nurse or midwife will ever earn. Imagine a world without Gina Rinehart. It’s easy to do. That world would look just like the one we live in now. Now imagine a world with no nurses; patients dying of preventable diseases and badly applied dressings, conditions going unreported. Life would be painful, dangerous and short.
Not to worry. NSW has a Labor government, so Minns will look after the workers, right? Anyone who knows Australian history will give a hollow laugh here. Likewise anyone who’s read the Guardian’s coverage of federal Labor’s attack on the CFMEU.
Minns has shown his priorities. He’s prioritising not having a budget deficit. He’s prioritising tax breaks for big developers. He’s prioritising giving money to private schools. All those things are more important to Minns than NSW having nurses who are paid what they should be.
Nationally we have priorities. Our capitalist Labor government puts tax cuts for the rich and insane spending on the military ahead of paying nurses enough to stay in work.
This is a rich country. We can afford to pay nurses properly.
More than that, we can afford to pay all workers properly. This paper has written a lot about the CFMEU recently. Read it carefully because what happens to that union will happen to any union that’s effective. Nurses have a much better public image than the CFMEU does. They’re usually shown as female, looking tired after doing difficult caring work in a hospital, while the builders are usually depicted as big scary looking blokes in black t-shirts just standing around looking threatening (never mind that they’re the ones who are going to build the new hospitals, as well as housing for the nurses).
The fact is, nurses and the CFMEU are connected. Why? Well they’re workers we can’t do without. Another connection is that what happens to the building workers affects what happens to the nurses as it does what happens to all other workers.
So let’s support the nurses of NSW as they fight for a living wage, and let’s fight for a good living wage for all workers.
