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Doctors' strike prolonged
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Doctors' strike headed into its third week

by Eric Jackson

As this story was written on November 19, contract talks between the nation's public sector physicians' organizations and the national government had reached an impasse and the doctors' strike was in its 14th day. Representing management in the talks is Health Minister Rosario Turner, while the various physicians' organizations have joint National Medical Negotiating Committee (COMENENAL).

The strike is affecting both the Social Security Fund (CSS) and Ministry of Health medical facilities, but the strikers are keeping the emergency rooms open. More than 20,000 doctors' appointments and some 300 elective surgeries per day are being rescheduled.

The walkout began with the government pleading that it had no money for any pay raises for doctors. Physicians, who had not supported the Torrijos administration's privatization of the management of the CSS pension fund, had fallen behind nurses, the leaders of whose union ended up backing privatization, such that some senior nurses had a base pay rate of $1400 per month while the starting base pay for a specialized doctor was $1300. According to the government's figures, public sector doctors overall make an average of $2430, as pay for overtime, seniority, added academic credentials and administrative responsibilities are added in. The lowest-paid doctors, the interns, start at $900 per month. The physicians started out asking for a 60 percent across-the-board raise.

In the first week of the strike the government was the first to blink, offering a six to seven percent raise that would put the specialists' base pay above that of senior nurses but not make up the real wages ground lost to inflation since the previous contract. COMENENAL characterized that as an insult rather than an offer and didn't respond. Later the government raised its offer a few points to 10 percent.

The doctors hinted that they might come down to 45 or even 30 percent, but added a demand that the government guarantee that it wouldn't privatize the health care system. The government said that it would do so, but the doctors found the proffered assurances insufficient.

Meanwhile, between his trips abroad President Torrijos has denounced the doctors for "intransigence" and PRD wardheelers and pundits were making much of an alleged decrease in deaths at public hospitals during the strike. (Deaths at private facilities and at home? The government wasn't releasing those parts of the picture.)

COMENENAL called the government liars, and Turner announced that replacement doctors would be hired. Fewer than 100 physicians, most of them young doctors who were already in the process of being hired into the public systems, were pressed into service. A few PRD members and some doctors who object to unions as a matter of principle ignored the strike call from the start. A very few private sector doctors went to work in public facilities, but more than 5,000 of the nation's 5,600 public-sector physicians were striking as this story was written.

(The only place where large numbers of replacement doctors might possibly be available is abroad, specifically in Cuba. It would be scandalous for a communist party to break a labor strike, but then Panamanian physicians have in the past objected to medical aid offered this country by Cuba and coverage of this strike in the government-controlled Cuban press has been mainly hostile to the doctors. The importation of Cuban scabs would strain the Castro regime's friendly relations with Panamanian leftist groups, which support the strikers, and on the other hand cause problems in US-Panamanian intergovernmental relations.)

The strike is generally unpopular with the public and universally condemned by the corporate mainstream press. However, most of the labor movement has expressed its support for the doctors. Moreover, employees at the nation's public universities have warned that they too need raises to keep up with the cost of living and labor - management talks about the minimum wage have bogged down over labor demands that the lowest-paid workers receive wages that fully make up for inflation since the last adjustment. Employers are balking, and in the event that there is no agreement the minimum wage will be set by presidential decree. The fear --- or hope, depending on one's perspective --- is that the doctors' walkout may be the first of a wave of strikes ignited by the recent sharp increases in the cost of living.

Also in this section:
Doctors' strike prolonged
Mark Boswell's alias Rex Freeman's Costa Rica office raided
Business & Economy Briefs