Hospital workers strike spreads throughout France

Anthony Torres

The strike by French hospital workers against the Macron administration’s healthcare legislation, which came into force in March, is spreading throughout the country. Of the 478 emergency services in the country, 216 are now involved in the movement that began in March and involved 80 hospitals by June.

The urgent care nurses and assistants are opposing Health Bill 2022 and the systematic deterioration of conditions for staff and patients that has been implemented over decades. Driven by spending cuts and the demands for “competitiveness,” hospital directors are implementing ever-more destructive cost-cutting measures, creating shortages of doctors and temporarily closing services.

Confronted with growing anger, Health Minister Agnès Buzyn contemptuously announced 70 million euros in additional funding, assigned to increase by 100 euros per month the bonus paid to emergency staff to account for the inherent physical dangers of the work. This did not calm the anger of the workers, who are demanding 10,000 additional jobs, a wage increase of 300 euros net per month, and an end to all bed closures.

Buzyn had to flee the hospital at La Rochelle on July 12, after being pursued by a group of protesting workers. Buzyn, who knows the hospital well from her work there as a doctor, had supposedly gone to assess the mood of staff over the conditions in the facility.

Between 1996 and 2016, the number of people treated in the country’s emergency care services increased from 10 million to 21 million. In 2018, according to SAMU-Urgences de France, 180,000 patients spent a night on a stretcher in the hallways of the urgent care wards.

At the Sainte-Foy-la-Grande hospital in northern Gironde, for example, the emergency service has been closed between 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. from August 1 to 31. Patients requiring care during these night hours are redirected to the Bergerac hospital in the Dordogne, about 20 kilometers away.

Because of a shortage of doctors, the Pithiviers hospital cancelled its mobile care unit, the Mobile Emergency and Resuscitation Service (SMUR), for 18 days, giving priority to its on-site services instead. The SMUR units of Montargis and Orléans are taking on the additional responsibilities, with longer intervention times as a result, as they too are struggling to recruit doctors over the summer.

According to Vincent Authié, a stretcher bearer and delegate for the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) trade union: “It’s true that we are in a region particularly affected by doctor shortages, but the management anticipates nothing. It does not make plans for staff schedules. We have known for a long time that there would be a problem.” The staff of the hospital joined the national protest movement at the beginning of the summer.

The emergency department of Beaumont-sur-Oise Hospital has joined the national strike movement. There are about 70 per cent of workers listed as participating in the strike movement among paramedical staff, although the service is continuing to operate.