Nurse shortage makes Africa's AIDS crisis worse, AFT leader says

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa is made worse by a severe shortage of nurses and other healthcare workers, who are also experiencing high rates of infection or leaving Africa for jobs abroad, says AFT vice president Candice Owley.

Owley, along with AFT Healthcare division director Mary MacDonald, traveled to Botswana, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe last summer, where they visited hospitals and met with representatives of nurses unions.

HIV/AIDS is “changing the face of the continent,” says Owley, president of the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Healthcare Professionals. Because so many have died from the disease, the average age of the population is now 18, and life expectancy in some countries has dropped to the 30s.

Owley reports that the epidemic has overwhelmed the healthcare systems in these countries—“some to the point of complete breakdown.”  Hospitals are extremely overcrowded, with few supplies and no safety equipment. Even though HIV drugs are becoming more available in some countries, “the bigger problem is the infrastructure to distribute those drugs,” she says.

In Botswana, a relatively prosperous country compared to its neighbors, many nurses trained under the British system there are quickly recruited by employers in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The same is true in Swaziland, Owley says, where up to 80 percent of nursing positions sit vacant.

A key part of the trip was to meet with a nurses union in Botswana that was seeking advice on becoming a trade union.

In South Africa, Owley and MacDonald visited a public hospital in Soweto, where half of the patients had HIV/AIDS. Nurses and lab professionals are in very short supply in South Africa, as is the case throughout the continent; at the Soweto hospital, there were 1,000 vacant positions. Owley and MacDonald also met with union leaders there who are aggressively fighting for adequate wages and benefits, as well as supplies and equipment.

Zimbabwe, once a vibrant country with a robust tourist trade, is essentially in economic collapse under a corrupt government. Healthcare employees are “leaving in droves,” note Owley and

MacDonald, and there is not enough gasoline to fuel the ambulances. There are no antiviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, even for the nurses who have been exposed to the disease, and no safety supplies such as gloves.

The AFT is assisting teachers unions in several African countries to fight the epidemic through the AFT Educational Foundation’s AFT-Africa AIDS Campaign. For more information, visit www.aft.org/partners/africa-aids/index.htm.

Florida violated faculty rights

The state of Florida erred two years ago when it reorganized the state’s higher education system and withdrew all recognition of the statewide faculty union and its collective bargaining agreement, a District Court of Appeals has ruled.

In 2001, Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature passed a bill abolishing the statewide board of regents and putting in place individual boards of trustees at the 11 institutions in the state university system. The 10,000 faculty in those institutions had been represented by the United Faculty of Florida/NEA/AFT since 1976. When the statewide contract covering them expired in January 2003, the state scrapped recognition of the union, maintaining that employees in the system had a new employer. This necessitated new organizing campaigns and elections on each campus, and new local contract bargaining. Faculty have reaffirmed their choice of UFF as the bargaining agent on 10 campuses.

The two unions affected by the reorganization, UFF and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, filed unfair labor practice charges with the Florida Public Employees Relations Commission. PERC dismissed the charges. The unions appealed.

In February, the court struck down the PERC ruling and restored bargaining rights. Citing the state constitution, the court said state government cannot “unilaterally terminate its obligations under a collective bargaining agreement simply by reorganizing the executive branch, where the employees affected perform the same work, in the same jobs, under the same supervisors, by operating the same facilities, carrying on the same enterprise, providing the same service.”

“This is an incredible moment for faculty who have been suffering through this process of devolution,” says Tom Auxter, UFF president.

Political action helps Montana public employees secure pay raise

It’s official: The pay freeze on Montana state employee salaries is over. More than 100 people, including MEA-MFT members, state legislators and local officials, were at the Montana State [Men’s] Prison in Deer Lodge in February to attend Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s bill-signing ceremony.

The bill enacts the two-year pay plan that MEA-MFT negotiated with Schweitzer in early January, shortly after his inauguration. Under the deal, state employees represented by MEA-MFT (The merged NEA/AFT state affiliate in Montana) will receive a

3.5 percent pay raise or $1,005, whichever is greater, starting October 2005, and a 4 percent increase or $1,118 starting Oct. 1, 2006.

The success of the pay plan reinforces the importance of political and legislative action by public employees and their unions. MEA-MFT started negotiations on state employee pay in August 2004 with the administration of then-Gov. Judy Martz, a Republican, who initially proposed continuing the pay freeze.

“From a political action point of view, we are reaping now what we sowed,” says MEA-MFT president Eric Feaver. “We worked hard to get Schweitzer and a Democratic Legislature [elected], and we did that to get a better deal for state employees.”