[Onthebarricades] POLAND: Police attack nurses' protest; solidarity march by miners

[Andy]

http://oreaddaily.blogspot.com/

MINERS JOIN NURSES IN POLAND


The article below is just a follow up story on yesterday's post concerning protests by Polish nurses. See http://oreaddaily.blogspot.com/search?q=poland for further information.

The following comes from Reuters Alert (UK).

Polish miners lend support to nurses' protests

Polish miners raised protest banners on Thursday to support hundreds of nurses who are demonstrating at the prime minister's office for more pay in a growing challenge to the conservative government.

State medical workers say they have been left behind by the rapid rise in salaries for other professions, partly the result of a booming economy since Poland joined the European Union in 2004 and of emigration that has led to a tight labour market.

Hundreds of hospitals have been affected by strikes for six weeks and nurses have been protesting outside Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski's office for the past three days.

Public radio said 1,000 miners, many from southern Poland, were expected to join the protest. At this stage, they are not threatening to go on strike themselves.

"It shows we are not alone and that we have a point," said Barbara Wysocka from a hospital in Gdansk on the Polish coast. "Maybe now that they can see that we are not alone, poor women, they will start listening to us."

Kaczynski has offered pay rises of 15 percent per year over the coming three years, but doctors and nurses say their wages were low to start with and those for other workers are rising faster.

Deputy Health Minister Boleslaw Piecha said the government was ready to talk to the nurses, but only after the departure of four who are occupying one of the rooms in the office building. He also accused the opposition of fanning the protest.

"We have seen more politicians in front of cameras than nurses," Piecha said.

Kaczynski has said he would not deviate from "economic realities" in talks with the nurses. Polish wages rose almost 9 percent year-on-year in May and that has raised expectations that interest rates will go up again soon.

Minutes from the central bank monetary policy council's meeting in May, which were released on Thursday, showed rate-setters saw the labour market as the main risk factor for boosting inflation.

"Living on 800-1,000 zlotys ($280-350) a month is just not enough," Wysocka said, adding she would follow the thousands of Poles who have left for Western Europe in search of better pay if nothing changed. 

COPS ATTACK NURSES IN POLAND


Polish riot police used batons to break up a protest by nurses in Warsaw on Wednesday, escalating an already bitter stand-off between the conservative government and health workers demanding better pay. Although the nurses are not on strike, Poland's conservative government is already confronting a go-slow by hospital doctors who are also seeking pay hikes.

The nurses, many dressed in their white hospital uniforms, had remained at the site after Tuesday's rally, where about 10,000 health workers had called for a 30-percent pay raise, following a similar hike last year, and an increase in government health care spending.

At that rally many in the crowd shouted, "We want to work, not to emigrate."

Poland's state-employed medical workers are notoriously poorly-paid, like their counterparts in many former communist bloc countries.

"I'm demonstrating because with 1,100 zlotys (290 euros, 388 dollars) a month, I can't feed my children," Anna Niewczas, a 35-year-old nurse from Radom, south of Warsaw, told AFP.

France's News 24 reported although the security forces cleared the street itself, the nurses managed to continue camping on a nearby verge, where they were ringed by police. Local residents turned out to support the protesters and gave them coffee.

"The police pushed us brutally onto the grass," said Zofia Kolanko, a nurse from the southern city of Krakow who had spent the night on the street.

"We're going to carry on camping here until the government representatives come out to talk to us. Up to now they've been ignoring us," she added.

"The government isn't going to solve this problem with police batons," said Juliusz Piotrowski, a doctor from Warsaw's Banacha University

The following is from EUX-TV (Netherlands).

Police force protesting nurses off street in Poland

Police used force Wednesday to break up a roadblock by some fifty Polish nurses in front of the prime minister's chancellery in Warsaw aimed at securing wage hikes in Poland's chronically underfunded public health sector, Poland's TVN24 news channel reported.

Two protesting nurses were rushed to hospital by ambulance after the police intervention. One woman reportedly suffered a heart attack.

"I can't believe my eyes - these nurses were treated like football hooligans, there could have quite simply been talks," Civic Platform opposition MP Elzbieta Radziszewska told TVN24.

The protesting nurses were vastly outnumbered by police dressed in riot gear.

"Road blocks are illegal. We spoke with the nurses all night, we met their requests but this didn't change the situation," Warsaw police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski told TVN24. He denied heavy force was used to remove the nurses camped out on a central Warsaw street in front of government buildings.

Doctors and nurses in Poland's chronically underfunded health sector are demanding wage hikes, which the government has said are impossible to meet in this fiscal year.

The protestors have appealed to Poland's First Lady Maria Kaczynska to facilitate negotiations with the government lead by her brother-in-law conservative Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Several hundred medical workers marched through the Polish capital Warsaw Tuesday in protest of low wages in the public health sector. Physicians and nurses have also been staging a go-slow protest job action in hospitals and clinics for nearly a month. 

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