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Extra update:
Ambassador highlights US-RP dispute in Veterans Day remarks

Government refuses to talk about wages, doctors extend strike

Government refuses to talk about pay

Doctors extend two-day walkout to indefinite strike

by Eric Jackson

After a five-hour bargaining session on November 7, in which the Torrijos administration's negotiators refused to talk about pay issues with the National Medical Negotiating Committee (COMENENAL) coalition of public sector physicians' and dentists' organizations, the latter voted to indefinitely extend what had begun the day before as a 48-hour strike. Affected are the Seguro Social and Ministry of Health facilities, but not private hospitals, clinics and doctors' dentists' offices.

The government negotiating team, which is led by Health Minister Rosario Turner, took the initial stand that there would be no pay raises for doctors until after the Torrijos administration is leaving office in 2009. Then Turner insisted that there can be no discussions about pay until the doctors improve health care services.

Turner, as director of medical services for Seguro Social during the 2006 mass poisoning of patients by the distribution diethylene glycol - tainted cough syrup mixed by that institution, was part of a public health care manangement that sat on warnings by doctors, nurses and pharmacists that there was a sudden rash of mysterious deaths and illnesses from late July until mid-October of that year, greatly increasing the death toll. According to prosecutors there are 705 suspected poisoning cases. However, the Torrijos administration denied funds to conduct prompt investigations and now it's too late to conduct valid post-mortem toxicology tests on the remains of victims. Citing lack of proof, the Torrijos administration has only admitted responsibility for fewer than 200 poisonings and citing legal difficulties citing next of kin it hasn't provided any benefits beyond funeral expenses for most of these.

Moreover, in her role at Seguro Social, Turner was also part of an administration responsible for constant shortages of needed medicines.

Thus Turner's insistence that doctors are responsible for deficient conditions in the public health care system, coming from that woman in particular, has been taken as something of a mortal insult by the COMENENAL negotiators and rank-and-file physicians.

It may be that the Torrijos administration is deliberately aggravating the impasse with the hope of smashing the medical unions. The current confrontation was set up in 2005 when doctors walked out along with most other public sector employees against the privatization of the Social Security Fund. After having to back down on their first privatization attempt, the PRD administration co-opted the nurses' union with pay raises that have senior nurses making more than senior doctors. But the doctors wouldn't go along with the government's transfer of a large part of the Social Security Fund management to private banks and the Torrijos cabinet thus sent a 2008 budget to the legislature with no money for pay raises for doctors, knowing that contract negotiations were coming at the same time.

Some of the tactics used to break a teachers' strike in 2006 have been threatened in this labor negotiation. In 2006 the four teachers' unions were grouped in the Teachers Action Front (FAM), but the government created a paper teachers' "bargaining committee" called the Teachers' Unity Coordinator (CUM), "reached an agreement" with CUM --- which was never put to a membership vote because there is no CUM membership --- and announced that the talks were over and FAM would have to accept the results of the "dialogue" between the government and itself. The contract talks with COMENENAL take place at the conclusion of a national health care reform "dialogue" boycotted by all but one opposition parties and from which most labor unions and social sectors, having been ignored, walked out. During the contract talks with COMENENAL Turner announced that other groups, including an association of physicians in general practice and a PRD-aligned patients' group wanted to take part in the negotiations on an equal footing with COMENENAL. Thus the administration may have another version of CUM in mind for the doctors.

However, on the second day of the walkout, November 7, the general practitioners joined the walkout, as did many of the doctors in the Interior, where on the first day only about half the physicians heeded the strike call.

Emergency rooms are still open, but doctor visits and elective surgeries are being postponed, with many patients being told that their visits or operations will have to wait until next year. Some 20,000 doctor visits and 300 elective surgeries are being postponed every day.

The corporate mainstream news media have been fairly unanimous in their condemnation of the strike, but as phsyicians are professionals and typically have private practices as well as their public system jobs and the government has been fairly flagrant in its conduct the doctors are getting some sympathy from business leaders as well as the labor movement.

President Torrijos has been traveling abroad, as he usually is when his administration does controversial things, and has thus been unavailable for questions about his and his ministers' conduct in this matter.

Extra update:
Ambassador highlights US-RP dispute in Veterans Day remarks

Government refuses to talk about wages, doctors extend strike