5,000 nurses threaten strike in dispute over temporary jobs

The Cabinet on Tuesday rejected a proposal to add 10,992 positions to the civil-servant system. 
A group of nurses working in state-run hospitals said yesterday that more than 15,000 nurses were working as temporary employees of the government and receiving low wages and no civil service benefits.
A representative of the Temporary Employee Professional Nurse Network, who requested anonymity, said his group had started a campaign asking all temporary nurses to show their power by changing their Facebook profile pictures to include a message that if they are not registered as civil servants, they will resign.
“This is a chronic problem in our public-health network, because we have 3,000 to 4,000 new nurses entering every year, but there are no more than 1,000 job positions as nurses in the civil-servant system,” he said.

Moratorium until 2026
“Every year the line for registering in the civil-servant system gets longer and longer and right now there are around 15,000 nurses in line and receiving only a Bt10,000 to Bt13,000 salary, but they have to work eight hours per shift and 30 shifts per month without proper welfare and annual raises.”
The nurses cannot tolerate the situation any longer and if nothing changes with the Cabinet resolution, more than 5,000 of them will leave the job, the representative said.
A strike would aggravate the already severe problem of a nurse shortage in public hospitals.
The May 9 Cabinet resolution on the proposal to increase civil-servant positions of the Public Health Ministry’s Permanent Secretary Office stated that the Cabinet had approved the increase of civil servants based on the report of the official workforce target and policy-setting committee.
The three main recommendations were to approve only 450 civil servant positions for hospitals in rural and border areas and forbid the Public Health Ministry from reserving more civil-servant positions for nurses until fiscal 2026.