Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Health and care workers have had enough

Tuscany Bell and Jan Willem Goudriaan 9th December 2022

Workers from across Europe descended on Brussels today to demand adequate investment in health and social care.

health and care workers,health,care,workers,protest,Brussels,unions,union,EPSU
Leading the march today in Brussels (EPSU)

As governments and employers bring back talk of tight budgets and spending cuts, health and care workers are taking to the streets. Across Europe, they have had enough—enough of being undervalued, enough of being underpaid and enough of not being able to provide quality care.

To highlight the crisis, the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) has organised a protest today in Brussels, coinciding with a meeting of Europe’s health ministers. Europe’s health and social-care workers are calling on ministers to recognise the essential roles they play. They are demanding adequate and sustainable public financing and needs-based staffing, and denouncing the commercialisation of health and care systems.

Strike wave

This year has seen a huge wave of strikes in health and social services across Europe, with grievances shared across the continent. Two years ago, millions of Europeans were applauding the ‘heroes’ working in hospitals, care homes and clinics. Today, these workers seem to have been forgotten.

Despite promises of pay rises in the early stages of Covid-19, health and care workers have experienced real pay cuts through rampant inflation. With many workers leaving the sector due to exhaustion and burnout after over two years on the pandemic frontline, those remaining are even more overburdened. One of the most challenging aspects of the job is now being unable to provide the level of care recipients deserve. This places an even greater emotional burden on the workers, which increases the psychosocial risks they face.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

During a strike in Spain in March, Juani Peñafiel, a care worker in Madrid and a member of the CCOO confederation, explained:

They have us in much worse conditions than we had during the pandemic: they haven’t renewed temporary contracts; a single cleaner has to clean 40 rooms, common areas and serve breakfast and lunch; we have nurses who have to attend 180 residents during the afternoon shift; a geroculturist has 11 minutes for each dependent person … enough is enough.

In October, health workers in Italy demonstrated with many of the same concerns. Antonino Trino, a nurse in Messina and member of the public-services section of the CGIL confederation, said: ‘I am here today to ask ministers for more attention to the nursing profession, a vital profession for the national health service. Nurses are forgotten, underpaid and vilified heroes.’

The severity of the crisis in health and care was recognised at the recent session of the World Health Organization Regional Committee for Europe. Dr Hans Kluge, director of WHO-Europe, said: ‘Personnel shortages, insufficient recruitment and retention, migration of qualified workers, unattractive working conditions and poor access to continuing professional development opportunities are blighting health systems.’ The EPSU, supported by many other organisations, added that governments have ’the crucial responsibility of securing and delivering the required funding to increase investment in recruitment and retention of health and care professionals’.

European Care Strategy

The European Commission has realised the need for action across the European Union. In the new European Care Strategy, associated with two Council of the EU recommendations, the commission has set out several policy measures to tackle the crisis.

The strategy supports the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights, which include the right to affordable long-term care of good quality, work-life balance for individuals with care responsibilities and the rights of persons with disabilities. It recognises these rights cannot be delivered without an adequately staffed, adequately funded and adequately trained workforce.

The draft council recommendation on access to affordable, high-quality, long-term care proposed that national co-ordinators should be appointed to monitor and implement the strategy and act as contact points at EU level, and that member states should submit national action plans within 12 months. While a council recommendation falls short of a legally binding instrument, these proposals would have ensured measures would be taken at the national level.

Regrettably, the European health ministers who have gathered in Brussels today do not however seem to understand the urgency of the crisis. The version of the recommendation on long-term care approved yesterday refers to national co-ordinators or an ‘appropriate coordination mechanism’ and removes the requirement for national action plans. Instead, it asks member states to communicate a ‘set of measures’ to the commission within 18 months.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

The language of the recommendation has also been watered down: instead of saying that member states ‘should’, it now says that they ‘are recommended to’. This suggests implementation is optional and undermines the imperative for concrete measures.

Pushing back

At today’s action, health and care workers from across Europe are pushing back. Among other things, they are calling for sufficient public funding and investment to allow workers to deliver high-quality care, increased protection for occupational health and safety, including against psychosocial risks, and reinvestment of any profit in the sector. They are also calling for the strengthening of collective bargaining and for sectoral collective agreements that uphold adequate, needs-based staffing, fair wages, good working conditions and trade union rights.

Joining the action with over 60 members, the Romanian health union SANITAS said:

The inflation rate in Romania increased to 15.9 per cent in September 2022, the highest level in the last 19 years. The cost of living is doubled compared with last year due to the increased prices of all consumer goods. However, most professions in the health and social assistance sector have seen insignificant salary increases of between €10 and €60 a month. In this context, it is necessary to draw the attention of European decision-makers to the fact that health workers in Romania are worried about their fate, as is everyone in the entire European Union.

Barbro Andersson, vice-president of Kommunal, the largest Swedish union, said: ‘Kommunal wants better conditions for everyone who works in health and social services. We’re convinced that with good wages and good working conditions, we can ensure the welfare not only of employees but also users, employers and society at large. That’s why Kommunal is participating in this protest.’

As Europe’s news cycle moves on and the attention of policy-makers and the public shifts, the action organised in Brussels today is a reminder that health and social services are the backbone of our societies. With the arrival of refugees from Ukraine and the energy crisis continuing to put pressure on key services, health and care workers will not wait for the sector to collapse. From workers across Europe, the message is loud and clear: enough is enough.

Tuscany Bell
Tuscany Bell

Tuscany Bell is policy co-ordinator for social services and youth at the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU).

Jan Willem Goudriaan
Jan Willem Goudriaan

Jan Willem Goudriaan has been general secretary of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) since 2014.

You are here: Home / Society / Health and care workers have had enough

Most Popular Posts

meritocracy The myth of meritocracy and the populist threatLisa Pelling
consultants,consultancies,McKinsey Consultants and the crisis of capitalismMariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington
France,pension reform What’s driving the social crisis in FranceGuillaume Duval
earthquake,Turkey,Erdogan Turkey-Syria earthquake: scandal of being unpreparedDavid Rothery
European civil war,iron curtain,NATO,Ukraine,Gorbachev The new European civil warGuido Montani

Most Recent Posts

water Confronting the global water crisisMariana Mazzucato, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Johan Rockström and 1 more
Hungary,social media,women Hungary’s ‘propaganda machine’ attacks womenLucy Martirosyan
carbon removal,carbon farming,nature Environmental stewardship yes, ‘carbon farming’ noWijnand Stoefs
IRA,industrial policy,inflation reduction act The IRA and European industrial policyPaul Sweeney
World Bank,Banga,global south The shakeup the World Bank needsAna Palacio

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


WATCH HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube