Nurses across New South Wales have overwhelmingly voted to walk off the job amid growing anger at staffing levels in the state’s hospitals, with more than 97% supporting a motion to hold the first statewide strike in almost a decade when NSW parliament resumes next Tuesday.
The industrial action – the largest by nurses across NSW since 2013 – will come just days after the resumption of non-urgent elective surgery, which had been paused to free up staff during the Omicron wave.
While a minority of the more than 200 branches of the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association had yet to vote on Wednesday, the union’s general secretary, Brett Holmes, told Guardian Australia about 97% of the more than 10,000 nurses who had voted on the motion so far were in favour of the strike action.
“Frankly, our members are very conscious that in November the premier made a decision to proceed with opening up no matter what,” he said.
“He kept saying our health system was passing the test and our members were saying no, it’s not. He caused untold levels of anger among our members by telling people that it was all OK and going well. From our members’ perspective, that was so disrespectful and so tin-eared to what was really happening in our health system.”
The decision of thousands of nurses to strike next Tuesday comes as part of a long-running call for the government to introduce minimum staff-to-patient ratios like those in Victoria and Queensland. They have also called for an increase in salaries above the 2.5% wage cap introduced by the NSW government several years ago, in response to the burden placed on staff during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Holmes said while nurses would retain “life-preserving care” in hospitals, some non-urgent elective surgery could be delayed by the strike.
“Hospitals have already had to cope with thousands of nurses in Covid-19 isolation so, you know, it’s not exactly outside of their current experience,” he said.
While different union branches have voted for different actions, some of Sydney’s major hospitals have voted for extended walk outs. Westmead hospital staff voted to walk out for 12 hours while staff in Blacktown, in the city’s west, plan to leave their jobs for eight hours.
On Wednesday, Royal Prince Alfred hospital staff voted to take “up to” 24 hours’ action but have yet to decide how long to stay off the job.
The NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, dismissed calls for staffing ratios similar to the policies in place in Victoria and Queensland.
“The advice that I’ve received is that there are substantive challenges to that and it hasn’t actually worked so well in other states,” he said.
He said he would support nurses’ rights to industrial action but did not want to see a year of rolling strikes.
“What I want is reasonable, robust discussions to get outcomes. Let’s not play politics. We don’t want to get back to the old union games.”
The NSW opposition leader, Chris Minns, called on the state government to give a Victorian government-style surge allowance boost to nurses, who he described as the “heroes of the pandemic”.
“It’s a payment that would go directly to nurses, paramedics, doctors, those who worked in the allied health professions in our public hospitals [who] have done it very tough over the last seven to eight weeks,” he said.
“It would go some way to showing our nurses and our frontline workers how much we appreciate them, how much we know they put on the line.”
