German University Clinic Doctors End Strike, New One Looms
June 19, 2006
The Marburger Bund -- Germany's biggest doctors' union -- will decide on Monday about the implementation of a vote that would see around 70,000 physicians go on strike at municipal hospitals in Germany. Discussions between the Marburger Bund and state negotiators about salaries and working conditions were stopped on June 9 after the two sides failed to come to an agreement.
Meanwhile, doctors are back to work at North Rhine-Westphalia university clinics following an agreement on Friday over pay increases and better working conditions for 22,000 physicians nationwide. Officially, the strikes are not supposed to end until next week, but a doctors' union spokesman said that "it's a sign of good will" that medical staff resume work on Monday.
The Marburger Bund union said the deal for the first time creates special salary conditions for doctors at academic institutions and will especially benefit younger physicians.
Their salaries will rise to 43,200 euros ($54,400) in their first year of work and 45,600 euros in the second. Further details were not immediately available. East German doctors expressed disappointment that wage agreements for East German physicians were significantly lower: 38,000 euros in the first year and 40,800 in the second.
The deal was reached after five hours of negotiations in Berlin on Friday, after which Marburger Bund union chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery called off the strikes that began on March 16.
Since then, tens of thousands of doctors at university hospitals and psychiatric clinics in most of the country have staged regular walk-outs that affected all but emergency services.
Montgomery said the union would still have to sell the deal to its members, adding that "this is not going to be easy."
The doctors have been protesting about what they say are low pay and long working hours of up to 80 hours per week.
But the deal will not mean the end of all labor woes in the German health care sector.
Doctors in private practice have embarked on a series of mass protests against government plans to overhaul the health care system.