The majority of the nurses employed in Silkeborg Municipality or Odense Municipality have been exempted from the strike, which has otherwise been initiated on Saturday night.
This is because in both cases the municipalities assess that the employees cannot be dispensed with to solve the most necessary tasks. And that the number of nurses in the emergency services will exceed the normal staffing.
In Silkeborg Municipality, the home nurses’ tasks have been reviewed to see if there are tasks that can be dispensed with during the strike period.
Here, the strike has been canceled for all nurses because it is “only to a very limited extent possible to opt out of some of the tasks”, the municipality writes in a press release.
– After the review, it is agreed that the emergency preparedness will actually have to exceed the scope of the daily staffing without temporary cover, it continues.
In the Danish Nurses’ Council’s department in Central Jutland, district chairman Anja Laursen is frustrated with the outcome.
She says that it shows that there are so few nurses employed in Silkeborg Municipality that it is not even possible to strike.
– I think it is extremely shameful that we nurses choose to go on strike because we have a large pay gap.
– And now it turns out that there are simply not enough nurses to provide emergency preparedness for the urgent, life-threatening and mobility-threatening work, says Anja Laursen.
In Odense Municipality, the number of nurses on strike in the municipality has been reduced from 200 to 25.
This has happened in collaboration with the Danish Nurses’ Council (DSR), says John Christiansen, who is chairman of the nurses in Southern Denmark under DSR.
– We show responsibility, in relation to what Odense Municipality asks us when it comes to what preparedness we must provide.
– The strike will look different in Odense Municipality than we had imagined, and therefore we will of course also consider what the next step is, he says.
About 5,000 nurses are expected to have gone on strike from Saturday. This corresponds to approximately every tenth nurse in Denmark.
The strike is the result of the nurses voting no to a mediation proposal in the Conciliation Institution on Monday.
The explanation is that the nurses want more in pay and a showdown with the civil service reform, which according to them is to blame for a pay gap.
Source: The Nordic Page