University Doctors Enter Week-Long Strike

After the state and doctors' union failed to reach a deal in last-ditch talks last week, doctors at 25 university and 14 state hospitals said they will lay down their stethoscopes for a full week.

The move takes the labor negotiations to a new level, after eight weeks of stop-and-go action strikes. Patients in the affected hospitals will have to make do with emergency care.

After failed final-round talks in Dresden on Thursday, the opposing sides -- the Marburger Bund physicians' union on the one hand and the German state tariff association (TdL) on the other -- are at an impasse. There are currently no plans for further talks.

The doctors have categorically refused the TdL offer, and Marburger Bund spokesman Athanasios Drougias told AP news service the union will only be ready to talk again when the states put up a new, better offer.

But the tariff association said it will not budge from its current offer, which involves longer working hours and differentiated wage increases. By its own account, the TdL has said it is counting on the "understanding" of the 22,000 doctors involved, who they think are unlikely to hold out long in the face of a protracted strike.

"I think most of the doctors are looking at our offer," a tariff association spokesman told AP. "Right now, a new offer is not being considered."

However, the Marburger Bund says almost all of the doctors involved will walk off the job.

'Record breaking' strike

"Well more than 10,000 at a given time" will strike, Drougias said. Up to now, doctors at different clinics had been hosting rotating, day-long protest strikes, which didn't cut too deeply into the medical services offered.

The current strike will be "record-breaking," Drougias said. University hospitals and psychiatric state hospitals in nearly 40 cities across Germany will be affected.

The parties are under increasing pressure to reach a speedy accord, however. German Health Minister Ulla Schmidt called on both sides to return to the negotiating table as quickly as possible and "finally find a solution … in the interest of the patients."

"Existential damage" to care?

Likewise, the Association of German University Hospitals (VUD) warned of the "existential damage" being done to patient care. The VUD has asked for mediation in the case, and members are meeting in Berlin this week to discuss the topic, association chief Jörg-Rüdiger Siewert told Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper. The president of the Society for German Hospitals, Rudolf Kösters, has called for doctors to stop putting patients in the firing line when it comes to their contract negotiations.

The head of the Marburger Bund, Frank-Ullrich Montgomery, said he is aware that many citizens have little understanding for the doctors’ demands for a 30 percent wage increase. But, he said, the clinic-based physicians are just trying to regain what employers had taken from them in recent years.

“They’ve been trying all along to reduce our wages by 30 percent through the back door," he said.

Doctors are hoping for moral support from patients, even though non-urgent operations will have to be postponed even further due to the extended strike action. The doctors say that they would earn much more in most other west European nations and point out that more than 6,000 clinic doctors have already left Germany in pursuit of better working conditions elsewhere.

The protracted strike action has cost clinics millions of euros in the past eight weeks in terms of lost revenues from patient treatment. The director of the university clinic in Mainz, Peter Galle, says a financial disaster is just around the corner.

Financial woes

“The management reckons that at the end of this week our deficit will have risen by another 1 million euros. We’re trying to make up for this with rationalization measures and more intelligent solutions concerning the treatment of patients. We’re in the process of working out a scheme which will enable us to survive with fewer, but better-paid doctors."