Nurses preparing for nationwide strikes
Following the widespread nationwide protests of nurses and medical staff in July and the ultimatum they gave to follow up their struggles, a new round of their protests has been launched in different cities. Mashhad, Yazd and Zanjan are hot spots of these protests.
Including today, November 5, nurses protested and gathered in Yazd for the fifth day. And they chanted: “If one person is reprimanded, a thousand people will stand up”, “Nurse shout!, shout for your right!”, and “We don’t want forced overtime”. These protests have become so intense that hospitals are about to be closed and only emergency operations are performed and only emergency patients receive services. Today, nurses and radiology laboratory personnel gathered in Shiraz. Last day, nurses and medical staff held protest rallies in several cities, including Yazd, Zanjan, Shush, Ardabil, Bushehr and Birjand. In Zanjan, nurses turned the government ceremony on the occasion of Nurse’s Day into the scene of their protest and raised their voice of protest with the slogans such as “Promises is enough, our table is empty”. The nurses chanted in unison: “We don’t want you celebrate Nurses’ Day, we don’t want it!”. On this day, Moharram Ali Ramezani, one of the representatives of the nurses of Zanjan province, was arrested and this issue intensified the anger and protest of the nurses. In Bushehr, the nurses of the laboratory and radiology departments had gathered. And before this, nurses in Shush and also nurses in Shushtar gathered and protested.
The protesting nurses have called for national gatherings in front of the Ministry of Health in Tehran and governorates and for a three-day national strike from November 7th to 9th to follow up on their demands. The protest of the nurses is that their living conditions are getting worse every day, and against the discrimination and exhausting work pressures, and their demands remain unanswered.
Ending the discrimination in the pays and salaries of treatment personnel, correcting and significantly increasing the payment levels of tariffs, increasing the salaries and benefits in legal orders, providing and increasing human resources and improving the welfare conditions and completely settling the arrears are among the urgent demands of the nurses. They have declared “Our most important demand is to address the situation of forced overtime and very low tariffs”.