Coronavirus: thousands of public hospital staff to vote on strike action on Saturday ahead of potential walkout next week
- Hospital Authority Employees Alliance says its 13,000 members will vote if government does not close border with mainland
- Union predicts nearly 10 per cent of workers at city’s public hospitals could take part
Thousands of doctors, nurses and other hospital staff in Hong Kong are threatening to go on strike next week if the government continues to ignore their demands to completely close the border with mainland China.
A health workers’ union said on Friday that almost 7,000 public sector medical workers could take the drastic step if Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor did not act to combat the threat of the coronavirus outbreak.
The Hospital Authority Employees Alliance said the workers, accounting for about 8 per cent of all employees at public hospitals, had expressed their readiness to escalate industrial action if their call continued to fall on deaf ears.
Winnie Yu Wai-ming, the alliance’s chairwoman, said its 13,000 members would vote on Saturday to decide whether to press ahead with the planned strike, which could start as early as Monday.
“As medical staff, we never wish to resort to strike action to make our demands heard,” she said. “We hope the government will not back us into that desperate corner.”
But Ivan Law, the group’s vice-chairman, said they would urge workers to return to work if the situation got worse and there was an outbreak in the community.
Yu said the government’s plan to prevent a local outbreak, including asking mainland visitors to declare their medical history, had achieved little.
“If the source of the pandemic is not put under control, with suspected cases pouring into Hong Kong, it matters not how many quarantine beds the authorities set up, or how much manpower we have,” she said.
Yu revealed that of the 6,700 medical staff backing the action, 70 per cent were nurses, 8 per cent doctors, 13 per cent therapists, and the rest administrative and support staff.
If members voted to strike, about 30 per cent of the 6,700 who work in non-essential areas would be the first batch to skip work on Monday.
The rest would join a day later, the chairwoman added, if the government failed to reply to their demands.
Earlier this week the alliance demanded that the government close the border, arguing a failure to so would allow an influx of cases to jam the city’s public health care system, as well as compromising staff safety.
On Thursday, a group of 403 Hong Kong West Cluster public hospital doctors and nurses, including renowned medical figures, also wrote to the government, demanding it close the border and also threatening industrial action.
The Hospital Authority has asked to meet the alliance on Sunday and the union said it would decide whether to accept after Saturday’s vote.
On Friday, Lam said she appreciated the workers’ concerns, but stressed that five of the 12 confirmed cases in the city involved residents rather than mainland visitors.
When asked why she did not introduce measures to ban mainlanders, she cited the World Health Organisation, which warned against discriminatory action.
But Law said they had never suggested stopping only mainlanders. He said all visitors coming from the mainland, regardless of nationality, should be stopped, as long as they are not Hong Kong residents.
Law said the group expected any strike to be effective, as it would take up nearly 10 per cent of authority staff.
However, he also said the group would not be able to protect staff from any disciplinary action the authority might take. “We can’t control them,” he said.
As of Friday, Hong Kong had 12 confirmed cases, 11 of which involved patients entering Hong Kong from mainland China.
The death toll in China has risen above 200, among its nearly 10,000 confirmed cases.
