Nurses start this Wednesday a four-day strike organized by the Union of Portuguese Nurses (SEP) to demand scoring of their careers and equality with public administration graduates.
The strike will take place from 08:00 to 00:00 on November 17, 18, 22 and 23, with nurses joining the civil servants’ strike on November 18.
The leaders of the union submitted a request to the health ministry on Tuesday to continue the negotiation process with the government and went on strike to protest the “negative discrimination” of nurses, SEP President José Carlos Martins said Luz.
“The Ministry of Health continues to clearly not backdated from 2018 and does not correct the relative injustice. The ministry has no reason not to take it clearly,” said José Carlos Martins.
According to José Carlos Martins, “civil servants have been placed and received (retroactively) since January 2018,” but in the case of nurses, “the Ministry of Health has delayed this scoring for four years and now says it’s a lot of money. and that he has not been able to pay since 2018.”
On November 9, Health Minister Ricardo Mestre explained to Lusa that about 20,000 nurses would be covered by a thaw of wage progression agreed with the unions, with retroactive payments until January of this year and “an increase of one or two paid posts.”
At the same time, the SEP calls for equal pay with civil service graduates.
The union leader claims the government and the Ministry of Health are “discriminating” the wages of nurses by “having lower remuneration than other licensed public employees”, something that has not happened since 1991, and recalls that in January 2022, the graduate remuneration provision was valued and nurses are not.
The AKP assures that it will perform the minimum service and clarified that other trade union structures will not join the strikes on 17, 22 and 23 November.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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