Slovakia's Doctors No

Economist | Eastern Approaches


"WE ARE all in this together", runs the line from Britain's ruling Conservatives seeking support for their policies of fiscal retrenchment. Today's striking public-sector workers don't appear to have received the memo. In Slovakia, doctors have taken similar umbrage at what they consider to be a paltry pay offering from the government.

Earlier this autumn more than 2,000 Slovak doctors began to resign en masse, complaining that they were grossly underpaid. Yesterday the caretaker cabinet of Iveta Radičová—which lost a confidence vote in November but is staying on until elections next March—had to declare a state of emergency in 16 hospitals after they reported critical shortages of specialised staff, threatening to leave thousands of patients untreated.

The crisis is likely to hit breaking point tonight. The doctors’ resignations come into full effect on December 1st, and unless the government can force them to budge, Slovakia may be facing a full-blown health crisis before dawn. Encouragingly, 276 doctors rescinded their resignations today, but that is far from enough. Earlier today the government issued an official plea for help to its neighbours in the Visegrád group (Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland) as it continued negotiations.

Egged on by their unions, the striking doctors are demanding radical improvements in pay and working conditions. They are also calling for an immediate halt to the transformation of state-run hospitals into joint-stock companies, a process kicked off by Mikuláš Dzurinda, a previous Slovak prime minister (and current foreign minister), who himself faced demonstrations in 2006.

The doctors' demands have been endorsed by unions across Visegrád and wider Europe. According to Slovak reports the Paris-based European Federation of Salaried Doctors (FEMS) has said, in effect, that the doctors are waging a brave war against a corrupt government seeking to sell hospitals to Penta, a friendly investment fund.

The government's attempts to solve the crisis have gone nowhere. Two weeks ago the health ministry offered to raise the doctors’ monthly pay by €300 ($400), but that was swiftly rejected by the unions. The doctors failed to withdraw their resignations even after the ministry threatened to take away their jobs by implementing a new plan of drastic downscaling in most major hospitals.

Yesterday evening 400 doctors took to the streets of Bratislava, the capital, and the city of Banská Bystrica. Some dangled keys and carried candles in memory of the 1988 anti-communist “candle demonstration”. Tears welling in his eyes as he addressed the crowds in Banská Bystrica, Martin Kollár, a union leader, compared the struggle to the revolution of 1989. "We won’t stop fighting for what we deserve," he tubthumped.

But their support is dwindling. The most recent poll found that nearly 60% of Slovaks have grown tired of the doctors' protest. Slovakia's Doctors No will probably avoid the sticky fate of their counterpart in the James Bond film. But unless they compromise, they may regret having started this battle.