Nurses take the lead in healthworkers' struggle
N FRANCE as elsewhere, the watch- words of the 1980s have been "rationalization" and "rollback" as far as the public sector is concerned. Making nationalized industries like the health service profitable has been the unattainable goal of successive French administrations, and the strangely hybrid Rocard government is no exception in this regard.
But the nurses have had enough. As early as March, a joint demonstration was called by the main nurses' union, the CFDT (a national trade union federation politically close to the Socialist Party, and the anesthetists' leadership.
Nurses' coordination set up in April
In April, undoubtedly influenced by the healthworkers' struggle in Britain (see /V 135 &136), over 100 nurses from 22 hospitals in the Paris region came together to discuss their demands. These included a retroactive payment of 2,000FF [about $314 ] to make up for an ongoing loss of purchasing power, a general cost-of-living adjustment tied to the price index and to be built into salaries, similar rises in overtime payments, access to nursing courses, and professional training and status.
In June, the coordinating meeting attracted 200 nurses from 60 hospitals, seven of which were provincial, and it was decided to circulate a petition in the hospitals and plan a demonstration and one-day strike for September 29.
By September 15, a general assembly of the developing leadership attracted 500 nurses from 108 hospitals in the Paris region and 12 in the provinces.
The unprecedented growth of organized resistance by nurses to years of austerity in the health services is reflective of the same trend that produced the 1986-87 student strikes against the Devaquet bill, the rail strike, and the teachers' struggle.
For years, nurses have been regarded as Florence Nightingale-type "angels of mercy", who minister to the suffering without thought for themselves. The less exalted side of the job has been deliberately ignored - bedpans and broomsticks are bad press - while the stress of continually confronting death and disease, which results in nervous breakdowns and a high rate of attrition in the profession, are subordinated to this glamorized vision of thousands of saintly women nobly sacrificing themselves. 12 dened with so many routine duties that The reality is overworked nurses bur-
ON SEPTEMBER 20
240,000 nurses walked out in a one-day strike that was 80% successful. In
Paris, 30,000 nurses and other healthworkers demonstrated, joined by thousands more in the provinces, with hospitals all over France being affected.
The successful walk-out was the culmination of six months of intensive organizing efforts by nurses fed up with a chronic lack of recognition and dwindling real wages, and similar actions are planned for the near future.
Although the Minister for
Health, Claude Evin, has done little as yet to address the nurses' demands, the movement for change is so widespread and well-organized that there is little doubt this healthy
"infection" will spread further, quickly contaminating other sections of the health sector's workforce.
ELIZABETH MILLER they cannot be as supportive of patients as they would wish; nurses who work all day in the public sector and then contract themselves out at night to make ends meet.
They are paid only about 1,000FF more than the monthly cross-sectoral minimum wage.
At the other end of the medical spectrum, their status is constantly in question, as highly-paid doctors (and even patients)
ten ignore the three years or rigorous often ignore the three years of rigorous training nurses have to undergo to get their state certificate, often viewing nurses as merely the vigilant night-guard or the hand that administers the injection.
The final straw was the December 1987 governmental bill that effectively stripped nurses of their status by opening up nursing courses to anyone, regardless of previous training or degrees. This measure, if implemented, would reduce nurses of many years experience and seniority to the same level as health aids or unqualified trainees and ultimately lower their already inadequate salaries to a truly pathetic level. Health aids and trainee nurses have recognized the dangers that this poses for them as well and have come out in support of the nurses' struggles. Many participated in the national day of action on September 29.
The final factor in this struggle is the low percentage of nurses who are unionized at all. Just five percent of all nurses belong to unions, and those that do are fairly evenly divided between the three major federations.
But the nurses' coordination, based initially in the Paris region, has to a large extent overcome this problem. The nurses' coordination is the most dynamic and militant of the various coordinations that have been set up by healthworkers, to the extent that, for the first time ever, government representatives have had talks with such an unofficial workers' body.
### Nurses' militancy infectious
The vigorous, expansive and democratic nature of the nurses' campaign presents the national union federations with a stark choice: either support the nurses in their struggle by demanding that the government include their coordination in negotiaons, or ignore reality and leave this new - ana representative - movement out 1: the cold.
The nurses' militancy is certainly infectious. Aside from being in the vanguard of the various categories of healthworkers fighting for better pay and conditions, the movement that has built up is threatening to snowball and inspire other sectors of workers in both the public and private sectors to fight against unemployment and austerity. On October 8, the nurses' coordination called for rolling 24-hour strike actions and a national demonstration in Paris on October 13. That will be a day to watch! *
International Viewpoint #149 • October 17, 1988
INTERNATIONAL
Free-market sports THE BEAUTY of competition was presented with exceptional drama to an international audience this year at the Seoul Olympics. Urine sample tests, replacing the stopwatch and referees, were the decisive arbiter. The following article examines the problem of "performance-enhancing drugs" and what it represents more fundamentally. ALEXIS VIOLET that high-level sports have not been at all good for people's health. We find potentially grave metabolic problems in athletes, and I think that trying to correct these disorders, which is considered as drug-taking, may be medically necessary."
Immense pressures on athletes
In the Quotidien de Paris, Dr. Bellocq, who looks after the athletes on the French team, said: "A study has already been done of athletes asking them if they were ready
RANCO's minister for sport, a 100 F per cent Francoist who was later ambassador to Moscow, Antonio Samaranch was elected president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1980 thanks to the votes of the USSR, Eastern European and third world countries. A shrewd businessman, he has been eliminating little by little those committee members co-opted for life and replacing them with international-class businessmen, including a leader of the Krupp group and one close to the big international sporting-goods firm, Adidas.
Says Samaranch, "money has to serve sports rather than the other way around." He wanted the Seoul games to be the most successful in the world. Commercially, he achieved that. It was undoubtedly not out of altruism or self-sacrifice that the nine multinationals that belong to TOP (The Olympic Program) and are official sponsors of the Olympic Games put close to $100 million into them.
TV re-broadcasting rights amount to about $80 million. It seems that the money is going to Samaranch, who managed to make the IOC a big-time commercial enterprise.
South Korea's interest in organizing the Olympic Games was to project itself as a great power and present a "democratic" show-case. It is evident that it is going to get some benefits from this, among other things by improving its relations with the USSR and China, which is a very big customer.
All the records were broken: 161 countries, 13,000 athletes and 4,000 journalists participated. In particular, the record for security was dynamited. There were no less than 120,000 cops and soldiers to safeguard this festival of "joy and harmony." The Koreans insisted particularly on harmony. The chief organizer, Park Seh Jik, had solid references. He was the head of the "reeducation" camps, where 40,000 people were confined after the 1981 coup d'etat. Some of these people never came back, having been killed by the army.
South Korea got 33 medals, including 12 gold medals. Cheating was elevated to the status of an institution, especially in the body-contact sports. For example, boxing referees were bought, another was attacked in the midst of a general punch-up instigated by Korean officials, because he had dared to declare one of their people the loser. No holds were barred, Korea had to became the leading Asian nation in sports. That is good for business.
Its methods of training its 400 athletes were close to a commando-style attack. They were shut up in a paramilitary camp for nearly two years. Chun Ae was struck violently by her trainer. She suffered a broken eardrum. On her return from the hospital, she said: "He was right. He just tried to improve my performance. I am sorry that I was not the best. I must be worthy of my country." Such exacerbated nationalism has not been seen since the Berlin games in 1936.
However, what will be remembered about these games, confirming that sports today are the main socio-cultural spectacle and therefore the best support for advertising, is what was presented as the drugs issue and the apparent firmness of the IOC, the modern champion of purity. What was really involved?
Dr. de Lignières, an endocrinologist who participated in a ministerial commission on drug-taking, told Le Monde, 'The conclusions have been regarded as disappointing by those who formed this commission. We arrived at the conclusion that drug-taking is a very widespread practice in France, and to win a medal knowing that they would die two years later. Half of them said yes. Talk to 25-year-old athletes. They don't understand. Health is an empty word for them. With contracts worth millions of francs at stake, death means nothing." He added, "Frankly, the great athletes have doctors who play a broker's role."
Ben Johnson got $250,000 for a single race at a sponsored competition where there was no examination. The strictness in Seoul seems astonishing. In fact, the so-called fight against drugs was designed essentially to make three-and-a-half billion TV viewers think that top competitive sport is healthy, pure and exemplary. All that is false. It is well known that, among other things, these athletes are subject to frequent hormonal and sexual disturbances. They are stuffed with biological products that have been known about for a long time. This time, the IOC scored some points, but there has already been talk of genetic manipulations practiced on athletes that are impossible to test for.
A French sports official, A. Piron, has said, 'In France also we have prodigies. You have to find them at the age of 12, and then work differently with the elite and super-elite." Why wait 12 years? Why not select test-tube babies? The show will go on and bring in huge sums of money, with athletes resembling human beings. They will not be Frankensteins. They will be neat and well-brought up monsters. Top competitive sports generates this dynamic; drug-taking is only a consequence of it. *