United and nationwide strikes of nurses continue. Today, on August 13, nurses in Beheshti Hospital in Taft, Yazd went on strike, and the operating room staff also stopped working. Nurses of several hospitals in Arak, Islamabad West and Kangan also joined the strike. These strikes are taking place in the cities of Shiraz, Yazd, Karaj, Ahvaz, Tabriz, Bandar Abbas, Isfahan, Fasa, Jahrom, Abadeh, Ahvaz, Baghmalek and Zanjan. In Shiraz more than 90% of nurses are on strike, which is unprecedented.
Nurses object to forced overtime, low salaries, one-year delay in payment of benefits, discrimination in payment of tariffs or non-payment, hard and abundant work and long work shifts and low standard of treatment in hospitals.
The Coordinating Council for the Organization of Nurses’ Protests, which covers the news of these protests every day, has started its work with a campaign of demands, in which demands such as an pay rise proportional to the actual rate of inflation and its rise accordingly. Nurses are demanding that when the inflation rate causes the family’s budget to be over 30 million tomans/ month (&655), the minimum wage should not be less than this amount.
In this campaign, nurses are demanding other demands too, such as ending mandatory overtime and hiring nurses to the required extent, changing the status of contract nurses to a permanent status and having job security, stopping layoffs and returning to work for fired nurses, raising the health standard and the equipment of hospitals and treatment centers in a acceptable level, and free healthcare for all people. .