Our View: 48-hour doctors strike is totally unacceptable

The 48-hour strike called by doctors at public hospitals for next Tuesday and Wednesday isn’t certain to go ahead. These disputes often tend to get settled at the last minute – usually with the government caving in.

Even if the strike is averted, though, just the fact that it’s being threatened is outrageous, on a number of levels.

First and foremost, there’s the glaringly privileged status of these particular ‘workers’. Government doctors are apparently on annual salaries of about €150,000 – a factoid we know must be true because doctors’ union leader Sotiris Koumas was visibly annoyed when it was leaked by the spokesman of state medical service Okypy a couple of weeks ago.

Medicine has always been a highly-paid profession, of course – but the trade-off was that doctors led a hard life and were available more or less 24/7.

Public-hospital doctors in Cyprus, on the other hand, enjoy most of the benefits of civil servants, including good working hours, paid holidays and so on. They’re the last people who should be going on strike.

Even if doctors were badly paid, however, they’d still be doctors – which is the next level of outrageousness, the fact that such a vital sector is threatening to strike.

It’s even more shocking that unions are (or were) apparently considering shutting down A&E departments too, Koumas’ rationale being that some private hospitals also offer such services, so patients would still have somewhere to go in case of emergency.

Do we really expect someone with chest pains, or losing blood from an injury, to sit around trying to figure out which hospitals have A&E departments when every second counts? Doctors’ casual, irresponsible attitude towards the people they’re supposed to be serving is staggering.

Even if we gave doctors every possible benefit of the doubt, though, it’s still unclear that industrial action is appropriate here.

The right to strike is complicated, and of course often exercised against the state (the first-ever strike was by Egyptian artisans who hadn’t been paid by the Pharaoh, according to Wikipedia) – but it’s part of a relationship between employer and employee. The employee aims to damage the employer by refusing to work, even at the cost of damaging themselves by not getting paid.

That’s not remotely the case here. Okypy and the health authorities aren’t being damaged by the doctors’ strike, beyond a mostly symbolic risk of losing face with a portion of voters.

The damage falls disproportionately on a third party – namely, the public – which is not responsible for the strikers’ grievances, nor able to satisfy their demands. This is grossly unfair.

Strike action really belongs in the private sector, where the proverbial capitalist has all the power and the worker’s last resort is to try and hurt the bottom line. Ironically, private-sector workers don’t strike very often, worried that the business might fold or they might be made redundant – so instead we get a weird inversion where the ‘last resort’ is exercised by civil servants with job-for-life security and nothing to lose.  

The doctors would argue that they can’t be expected to sit there and take it – but in fact, beyond the union’s complaints about Okypy’s “insulting tone” (as if tone were a reason to strike now), the dispute which has led to the threatened strike has more to do with horse-trading than any important matter of principle. Union leader Moisis Lambrou described it as essentially technical, using the Greek word ‘logistiki’ which relates to accountancy or bookkeeping.

The conflict arises from money which the doctors say is owed to them under an incentives system, which in turn is based on money Okypy receives from the Health Insurance Organisation (HIO).

Simply put, the HIO money was reduced in 2023 and Okypy is trying to pass that on to the doctors, while the union is resisting, challenging Okypy’s logic, and generally demanding that they stick to the old deal.

If the unions have a good case, they should take Okypy to court and pursue all appropriate remedies. Otherwise, this whole threat to strike looks very much like a way to keep feeding at the Gesy trough for as long as possible – and for a group of greedy rich people to become even richer.

One thing’s for sure: the risk that a power struggle between two overpaid behemoths might lead to ordinary patients suffering severe health consequences – even potentially dying – is unacceptable.