The gang-rape of commonsense
When people who provide an essential service go on strike, they don’t do themselves any favours. We saw that with the drivers of buses and mini-buses last summer. Instead of arousing sympathy for their cause, what happened was that most of the country remained mystified as to what that cause was, while very clear in its mind that it despised the drivers for what they were doing.
The same thing will happen if teachers go on strike, or doctors, or the people working at the power station and the water control centre. We will hate them all. We will refuse to understand what they want. We will feel a pressing desire to put a rocket under the lot of them for selfishly disrupting our lives and the lives of vulnerable others. If those who provide an essential service wish to strike successfully, they must first ensure that the public is behind them. Without engaging the public and making sure that the public is prepared, however reluctantly, to contribute to the strikers’ cause with its endurance of severe inconvenience, the strikers are onto a non-starter. What they are saying, in effect, is that they don’t give a damn about what they’re doing to us, but still they want our support. And what is our natural and perfectly understandable reaction to that? It’s too rude to print here.
Malta is not Italy. We do not take strikes in our stride with a fatalistic shrug. Despite what are sometimes appearances to the contrary, we dislike big dramas and fusses and people creating turbulence in the streets and turning the day’s progress upside down. We are not prepared to have our teachers march out of the schools and onto the piazza with banners while our children create havoc at home. We will not try to be understanding or tolerant should Air Malta down all its planes because pilots and stewards have disembarked and gone off to sulk while the seats are full of people waiting for take-off. I imagine that the Italians don’t want any of that, either, but I’ve noticed that when there’s a strike on there, lots of people seem to view it as a form of public entertainment and even seek to justify the cause.
Maybe we’re a little less patient and tolerant here. Whatever it is, nobody had a good word to say about the nurses and their behaviour over the last few days. They were in our bad books already for having their union issue a ‘directive’ to staff at the cancer hospital not to treat a certain cancer patient because he was aggressive. Well, what do you know? Maybe we would be aggressive too if we were dying in terrible pain. Pain doesn’t turn us all into Christian angels fading palely on our pillows. Some people lash out, and nurses are there to deal with this kind of thing humanely without calling security and the union, trying to bear in mind that this is a dying man.
A few days ago, 100 of Malta’s 2,000 nurses rallied and were addressed by their union president, who told them that as from what would be tomorrow, they were not going to report for work at the state’s health centres, and that the health centres would be closed. You can imagine how much sympathy this got from everyone else. Whenever there’s a small accident at home, we use the Mosta health centre for stitches and suchlike. The nurses deal with it, and they’re very good. I was there the other day, my leg bleeding profusely after it was sliced by a bit of glass protruding from a bin-bag, and two construction workers turned up hobbling because they had injured their feet. The waiting-room is invariably packed with people waiting to see the doctor. There’s another queue of people waiting to pick up prescribed medicines.
It is a very, very busy place and it serves a large district that takes in much of central Malta. If it were to be kept closed as from tomorrow, those who need to see a GP would have to cast around for a private doctor, and those who need their medicines would have to descend on the outpatients pharmacy at the general hospital, creating further pressures. Meanwhile, those who have less serious accidents and would ordinarily have these dealt with at the health centre, would instead pile into the Accident & Emergency Department at Mater Dei, debilitating resources there. So the nurses’ union did not show disrespect only for patients in issuing this directive, but also for other paramedics and doctors.
The directive did not stop with the health centres. No. The idea was that as from tomorrow, no new patients will be taken into Zammit Clapp Hospital and St Vincent de Paule Home and any extra beds in the wards will be removed. The nurses’ union did not specify what it would do with the extra patients in those extra beds. Dump them on the floor, perhaps, or send them home with a drip attached. Who knows?
There’s more, and it’s worse. The nurses were directed not to treat patients at the cancer hospital unless “there is a full complement of nurses for the ward”. So let’s try to envisage the situation that was planned by the union to start tomorrow. People with terminal cancer lie in their beds, but nobody cleans their wounds, gives them their medicine, adjusts their drip or helps them with a bed-pan (or is that a duty for orderlies?) because there are only two nurses on duty when there should be three. So those two nurses abandon the ward and go and have coffee in the canteen. Or worse, they sit around the ward listening to the patients’ pleas for help and blank them.
As somebody pointed out somewhere in cyberspace – I believe it was a former nurse – those directives wouldn’t have worked anyway, because good nurses are unable psychologically to ignore people who are injured, ill or in need of their help. A good nurse will not sit there and ignore somebody who needs attention. The end result of these hugely irresponsible union directives would have been that conscientious nurses don’t abide by them and end up doing all the work, while the lazy and irresponsible nurses, who I imagine are in the minority, use the union directives as an excuse to sit about all day and do nothing.
Did you think that was it? It isn’t. Another union directive scheduled to start tomorrow was this. Nurses working in operating-theatres “will henceforth take their breaks on time”. You do realise what this means, don’t you? It means that operations would have had to be scheduled to fit around the nurses’ union-break, and this despite the conveyor-belt system under which the operating-theatres at Mater Dei are functioning so as to knock a dent in those endless waiting-lists. It also means that any nurse present in an operating-theatre during even the most serious surgical procedure would have been expected by his or her union to walk out, shirking duty, if the procedure took a little longer than expected and the minute-hand crawled towards break-time.
Frankly, I can’t imagine any nurse doing something quite so horrendous. I’ve had encounters with lots of nurses during my various dealings with the state hospital, and while some of them have been brusque, most of them have been lovely and all of them have been conscientious. So I really can’t understand why they have allowed themselves to be portrayed as heartless beasts.
I’m not finished yet, because there’s even more. As from tomorrow, the nurses had union orders not to change the dressings of those patients who are not on their ward, and those prepared for surgical procedures were to be prevented from waiting in the ‘pantries’ or ante-rooms before being taken into the operating-theatre. So where would they have waited – in the corridor, in their little gown split up the back, and with no one to attend them except perhaps an angry relative? Most controversially of all, nurses were going to be ordered not to be on call at Mater Dei’s Renal Unit. Hospital superintendant Frank Bartolo said that this could cost lives.
These directives, planned to begin tomorrow but fortunately called off after the government stepped in and John Dalli had a meeting with the president of the nurses’ union, have been preceded by others. Nurses were ordered by their union not to carry out ‘non-nursing duties’, which brought to a halt non-emergency blood tests in health centres. Now, following that meeting, the nurses’ union and government representatives will form a committee chaired by Dalli, to deal with the issues raised by the union and find solutions. My view is that it was entirely unnecessary to use this kind of brinkmanship to agree on the setting up of a committee to sort things out. The committee should have been the first option, before the directives that risked causing so much unhappiness to so many.
And please don’t tell me that the directives were a way of strong-arming the government into setting up a forum for the civilised solution of nurses’ problems. The trouble is that strikes, directives, working to rule and marching in the street with banners have become our preferred mode of getting things done: confrontational instead of conciliatory, like that absolutely ridiculous gathering-together of Malta’s unions in a march up Republic Street last week, the sole purpose of which was to ‘ask the prime minister for a meeting’. Why didn’t they just pick up the phone and ask for the next slot in his diary, like everyone else does? It wasn’t a historic occasion, as they described it. It was the gang-rape of commonsense.
John Dalli has his shortcomings, but he is just the kind of person you need to deal with this sort of behaviour. He said he would not meet the nurses’ union unless it called off the dreadful strike directives planned to begin tomorrow. “I will not meet with anyone who is holding a revolver to my head,” he said, calling the union’s behaviour “cowboy tactics”. “We will not put up with anything that threatens the life of patients,” he said. “We are not going to accept the obscene abuse of laws which allow unions to take partial industrial action.”
So what are the nurses fighting about? Staff shortages (I’d like to see their reaction if Filipina nurses were to be brought in to make up the numbers), no staff meals (entirely the fault of that midwife who claimed she suffered a great trauma as a result of finding a bit of mouse-bone in her salad), and the fact that they do not have a professional warrant and hence, professional status as they see it. Another bone of contention appears to be that the government is not honouring the collective agreement signed late last year, particularly that clause which allows those nurses who reach the age of 60/61 to stay on in the job. Dalli has denied the union’s accusation that most of the agreement is not being honoured, but he said too that some clauses require more discussion, and that he is talking to other government officials to ensure that nurses can keep working beyond the age of 60/61. I can see immediately what the problem is here. If the government gives nurses the right to stay in their job beyond official retirement age, other state employees are going to want that too, and the government, unlike a private company, cannot use its discretion and retain only those worth retaining, while seeing retirement as a fortunate way of getting rid of the others.
Now the nurses’ union is picking on its own honorary president because he criticised its actions. They are holding a meeting to decide whether to get rid of him as I write this, and so I still don’t know the outcome. Rudolph Cini headed the union for 11 years, and moved onto his honorary position fairly recently. He had the temerity, as his successor Paul Pace saw it, to question why the union was issuing directives that hurt patients because of a dispute it has not with the patients, but with the government. He pointed out that those who plan and issue these strike directives must assume responsibility for the consequences. Cini said that Pace rang him to ask why he did not consult him (for which read ‘seek permission and approval’) before speaking to the press. When Cini protested, Pace hung up on him.
Perhaps it’s time the nurses’ union took a decision not on whether to get rid of its honorary president for speaking up, but on whether to get rid of the executive president for causing all this trouble and driving them into a corner. I’ve never met him, but in the media he comes across as one of those ego-trippers who latch onto an organisation and make it their means of self-validation. There are quite a few of them about, terrified of being consigned to the very oblivion from which they have been lifted by their crusading on the back of an organisation.
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Damn well said Daphne!!
I am wondering, do nurses take the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath? First do no harm?
What needs to be done is to oust Paul Pace from the union, and reevaluate what the MUMN is there for. When MUMN was first started it was a good union. Yes, nurses need a union that sees to their needs, but a nurses’ and midwives’ union is also there to foster a sense of responsibility towards the profession, towards the people who are the nurses/midwives’ clients……..the patients.
Paul Pace ought to resign or be sacked by the council that he heads. To turn on Mr Rudolph Cini and dishonour him from honorary president just because Rudolph commented that the directives are not right is something to be ashamed of. Mr Cini was a formidable president. I had worked with Mr Cini when he was president and believe me the atmosphere was totally different.
Maria c, Daphne is right when she says that she is not judging nurses by its union……….but unfortunately you are all part of the said union. So he had only 100 nurses who attended the rally. So what? When Mr Pace speaks, he is speaking as president of the nurses’ union, the only union that the government and the whole population of Malta recognise as the sole voice of the nurses. So, yes, unfortunately people will be judging nurses and midwives by what the union does.
There is only one way……….kick out Paul and the whole executive council, elect new people who have the profession and patients at heart, and then all nurses and midwives will get the respect that fundamentally they deserve.
Comparing this strike with that of the bus drivers does not look quite correct. Nurses offer an essential service, and their strike could have caused immediate consequences. The bus drivers’ strike, on the other hand, was not really effective, and most people were getting along quite well, too well for the union perhaps. So the bus drivers decided to block the roads, as their strike was only showing that they are not as indispensible as they would like to seem. And their extra actions were what angered most people. That is, most people were not angry at the bus drivers for sitting down all day and not driving their buses, but at the blocking of the roads and the violence used.
Honestly the question of meals is one of the issues . I have worked for 45 years and i was never given any free meals . I had to take along what my dear wife prepared which meant sandwiches and a good meal in the evening . Another issue is the retiring age . Yet some months ago when the government issued a white paper suggesting retiring age goes up to 65 as far as i know we witnessed a lot of objections from the unions
Daphne- You are always against the trade unions when you write about industrial disputes. It is the Health Division which is leading the unions to order industrial action. Do you know why? Because the Division is always dragging its feet when confronting industrial issues. You criticised the unions for requesting a meeting after demonstrating in Valletta. So I presume you wanted them to ORDER STRIKE ACTION so that you can criticise them for doing “harm to the nation”. We are a lot more sensible then you think we are.
[Daphne – No. I just wondered why they didn’t pick up the phone and ask the prime minister for that meeting, instead of demonstrating through the streets as though he’s some kind of dictator or pseudo-Mintoff locked up in his castle and refusing all contact with people.]
Looks odd to me that while policemen and soldiers cannot strike, these nurses, who play a very vital role in the patient’s health, can do as they please.
It seems here that everyone is missing the boat. What MUMN is suggesting is outrageous. What would you all say if tomorrow, you needed to be hospitalised and nurses do not come to your bedside to help you because they are following directives from their union??
What would the student nurses do? Will they be following blindly what the nurses on the wards are doing, or would they think about what their lecturers at the Institute of Health Care do?? Will the lecturers go on teh wards to help the patients or will they follow what their union says?? I presume that all nurses being practitioners or educators are all memebers of the said union, so would they as educators obey their union directives?
Our student nurses who get a free education from university, and a stipend from our taxes, are being taught apart from their educators by the nurses on the wards. They are having a system nowadays whereby qualified nurses act as buddies to the student nurses. So teh students will automatically do what their budies do, no?
The public needs to be told exaactly who teh real cowboy is, is it the Hon Mr. John Dalli or the President of MUMN Mr. paul pace?? For me the bad guy is Mr Pace.
I would really love to see what all the nurse educators have to say in relation to this.
no staff meals (entirely the fault of that midwife who claimed she suffered a great trauma as a result of finding a bit of mouse-bone in her salad)
I hope we’ll be seeing mouse head with strawberry coulis in Taste soon. Mice make tasty little morsels. Let’s not be ridiculous please Daphne. What did you expect the nurse to do? Just eat around it?
[Daphne – Go to the counter, complain, register her complaint formally, buy another meal, eat it, go back to work, and that’s the end of that. If she needs two weeks off and therapy for this ‘experience’, then I hate to see her reaction when she’s standing at the business end of a woman giving birth to a baby with a large head – and she’s a midwife. Are we expected to believe that she was traumatised by finding this in her salad when she spends her days dealing with the kind of blood, guts, split you-know-what and placenta experience that would make the rest of us pass out if our eyes were not, mercifully, positioned so that we couldn’t see what was going on?]
NO that’s not the end of that. MOST complaints in Malta get lost in some administrative black hole. Do you really believe that just be registering a complaint, anything would have been done? God knows what has been covered up in this country. The culture of omerta we have is one of our worst characteristics as a nation. And when things go wrong, we rarely complain. She should be commended on having spoken up.
On a similar note, have you ever noticed how, even if you’re in a restaurant from Hell, if some stupid waiter asks how the food is, most people would just mumble something on the lines of yes good, rather then rock the boat.
Daphne, I cannot agree with the MUMN but i have some sympathy for them. Getting to meet anyone in the Health Dept or Ministry has become a trial of telephone calls, emails ect, and unless you threaten and bluster you do not get anywhere. They try riding roughshod over the private sector, which is giving them a service, let alone their own employees. For example, do you know that suppliers of medicines, as I am, are supposed to be paid after 160 days for medicines, and its a take it or leave it matter? In actual fact, they are taking up to 250 days to pay, and are very rude about it. Anyone who is a small company cannot afford to finance the Government, its only the big importers who can, and who are paid on time because they have a stranglehold over the Ministry and the “fat” to sustain themselves that we small companies simply do not have. Not only that, but some of us factored govt. invoices with the banks based on govt. contracts and we are now in trouble because even the banks cant get their money out. In truth I dont blame the staff, because they have to make do with the shorfalled budget Government gives them. But the excuses, the “ghidlu mhux hawn” responses you hear, the lenghts that the Govt and its employees go in order to delay payment is just not on. Going upstairs to try and rectify the situation is no easier. The high officlais are never there,they never return calls, and you would think that they carry the world on their shoulders the few times you meet them. Paul Pace is not right, but Govt needs to get its act together and fast. They have to meet, listen and not just rule by diktat because of some percieved God Given right. That doesnt work with people. Also the amount of human resources wasted at Mater Dei, both because of the Onions ( unjins) and the collective agreements, is out of this world; Loads of security guards that have nothing to do whilst we pay good money
Nobody ever thinks about the poor mouse.
http://blogs.sltrib.com/movies/uploaded_images/capt.jrl13105081808.mideast_palestinians_hamas_mickey_mouse_jrl131-727946.jpg
@ Mario Debono : I think that there is an EU law which stipulates that small businesses have a right to be paid on time. Lack of cash flow kills small businesses .
John, its called the Late Paymemts Directive, and it is flouted on a daily basis by the Government, with the excuse that people dont pay taxes on time. Besides this, if you are even a day late in your deliveries, they deduct 1% per day as penalties. No excuses. Your shipment could have been held up in some port, or the ship would have sank, or whatever. No excuses. They charge penalties. They even charged penalties following the chaoes that there was in freight after 9/11. Again, no excuses. Then they bleat on and on about medicines prices and use it as a favourite political whipping horse, when in fact they LEGALLY can do nothing to control any prices in the market, be they medicines foodstuffs, whatever. Both parties are to blame.
@ John Schembri / Mario Debono EU law stipulates that a dominant operator in the market cannot dictate credit terms, because it is abusing its position.
“lack of cash flow kills small businesses” is false. Lack of cash flow kills ALL businesses. Small companies will have comparatively smaller amounts due , while larger companies have greater amounts due, so generally speaking the number of credit days due as percentage of total sales would be very similar for all companies of all sizes (in the same sector)
@ Mario , do I sense some envy about large (successful) companies. I admire them ,as success is the result of sheer hard work AND entrepreneurial spirit. Alfred Pisani springs to mind .
Just a thought – most Maltese businessmen are not entrepreneurs, but traders. No wonder we are just a whining lot.
@ Mario Debono – The problem is that our civil servants have become an independent kingdom within the government. They take their time, they impose their position on others, departments disagree between themselves about legislation and its interpretation, and then when it comes to take action on any one of us, they come down like a ton of bricks.
I can assure, I sympathise with you as I have had a number of skirmishes with the civil servants and as many times my arguments and fights are not for personal gains but for the good of the community, I am beginning to ask myself – what makes me do it?
What kind of monsters are these?
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Baby-P-Timeline-Of-The-Toddlers-Tragic-Life-Haringey-Social-Services-Premature-Death/Article/200811215151356?lpos=UK_News_Article_Related_Content_Region_9&lid=ARTICLE_15151356_Baby_P%3A_Timeline_Of_The_Toddlers_Tragic_Life%2C_Haringey_Social_Services%2C_Premature_Death
[Mario Debono – For example do you know that suppliers of medicines, as I am…….]
Thank you for confirming that what I said in another “thread” (is that the right word?) was right – i.e. that doctors prescribing within the health system are already obliged to prescribe generic drugs in many cases, because generic drugs are what the Government, many times, includes in its formulary – though not always.
Yes, D. Fenech, read all about Baby P. a few days ago. It’s appalling, isn’t it, especially when one considers how many social workers/ nurses/ doctors actually saw to the child and noticed nothing untoward?
Daphne – I am a UHM member and I heard our Secretary Gejtu Vella say that on the utility tariffs issue there was no meaningful social dialogue as has happened on the Budget.
It was after the demonstration that things began to untangle. On the nurses issue I reiterate that the Health Division is to blame for industrial action because things don’t start if strike action is not taken. Take also the case of UHM pharmacists’ claim. UHM has been requesting counter proposals from last OCTOBER and the union had no option but to revert to strike action. It is NOW that MPO intervened.You have to be balanced in your arguments.
[Daphne – I am balanced on the side of the end-user, sorry. Unions don’t float my boat.]
@ David S : success is the result of good contacts Primarily not political), and not only in Malta. Just look at Berlusconi. Need I elaborate?
[Daphne – Bullshit.]
@ John Schembri – You are a silly man, probably the envious type too.
FYI Berlusconi had a great idea and it made him rich. When national private TV was illegal in Italy , he bought or franchised several small TV stations throughout Italy, and used to broadcast the same programmes simultaneously from these small local stations, and hey presto he was not breaking any law, but was in effect competing with Rai for national advertising – but such an idea would never cross Mr Schembri’s mind.
So according to Daphne & david s , the contacts Berlusconi had in the P2 do not count..
Success in business needs loyal support by a good network of contacts,
I do not envy such people.If you have eyes to see. then have a close look around you and you will make the same conclusion.
There were people who had great ideas but found innumerable obstacles created by the same network of people who put a red carpet for the ideas of their ‘brothers’.
I cannot admire the latter, can I ?
Where are the nurses? How come none of them are contributing here? Are they so overworked that they are not trying to redeem themselves? Are they going to let just two men………….Paul pace and Colin destroy the good work that most nurses do?
David S, envy is such a waste of time, is it not. I am not envious about large companies, because I do operate in other markets, and difficult ones at that, without the hassle that the Maltese Civil Service brings about, so I dont need to be. Whatever ideas do not come to mind I buy in. I am a small entrapreneur in the family mould, who incidentally introduced ready mixed concrete in Malta in the 20’s for example, only a month after the first plant started operating in the UK.My great great grandfather traded in a Maltese Schooner as far away as Peru…. (as an aside, if I am right re your identity, you should know I am a bit different on the local market)
I have many friends who operate small companies who are literally crucified by Governmnet debt, be it for medical goods, services, roadworks, carpentry, pavements, and the list goes on. Govt does not like paying, and some people have to resort to a “grogg” to get paid.
Chris II got it right when he said “The problem is that our civil servants have become an independent kingdom within the government. They take their time, they impose their position on others, departments disagree between themselves about legislation and its interpretation, and then when it comes to take action on any one of us, they come down like a ton of bricks.”
Whoever is in Government, the civil service remains its own little empire and most times Ministers are befuddled by it untill they start chasing their tail.
Daphne, I dont agree wholeheartedly with you regarding contacts. They are everything, as long as you take the hard work and the risk to make them.
Even you cant deny the Old Boy Network in Malta and the existence of the Masunerija. Its there, it exists, and transcends political and business barriers. I daresay some bloggers in this blog form part of it. I’m sorry John, you are partly right. Contacts are important, friendships even more, especially in business. But Contacts alone do not make a business.Ideas do. But i wouldnt call you silly for thinking so.
Maria..I dont think that I ve nothing to redeem but I can only speak for myself and I manage to read this blog only because Im on Maternity leave:)Anyway I spent the last 9 years of my life working hard and it hurts to see that some people are ready to use these ridicilous measures that will lead to no where apart from destroying the image of our profession.Our union should fight to improve the conditions of how we work as this will result in better care for our patients. Well as for the students I hope that they enter nursing/midwifery with the right reasons because really this is a hard job with long hours but at least for me it leaves me with a great sense of satisfaction.
Just for the record the person who found the mouse is a nurse and not a midwife
@ Mario Debono: “habib fis suq jiswa daqs mitt skud fis-senduq” , so the Maltese saying goes.I can tell you from my personal experience that if I am doing some work in a government department and I find an acquaintance or a friend with whom I worked before and ask him for a photocopy of my documents, “Hey presto”, I get it . I would be fortunate if I get the same service in an hour through the official channels.
Ideas are important but without contacts you will only find people opposing you and putting obstacles in your way. If on the other hand you copy other people’s ideas and have these kind of contacts helping you , yes you will surely “succeed’.
Where has david s gone?
Allright I respect your views but the human race is not made up of end users only.