AFT healthcare leader reports on visit to African countries
Nurse shortage makes Africa’s AIDS crisis worse

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 Bots­ wana, 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. Be­ cause 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, 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.

Montana public employees secure pay improvements

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 on hand at the Montana State [Men’s] Prison in Deer Lodge Feb. 24 for Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s bill-signing ceremony.

The bill enacts a two-year state employee pay plan MEA-MFT, Montana’s merged NEA/AFT affilliate, negotiated with the Democratic governor in early January, shortly after his inauguration. Under the deal, state employees represented by the MEA-MFT 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 October 2006.

“This was a huge deal for the [Deer Lodge and Anaconda] community,” says MEA-MFT president Eric Feaver, who joined Schweitzer and other dignitaries on the state airplane for the trip to Deer Lodge. “When you pay employees better, they go spend money.” MEA-MFT, which represents 450 workers at the prison, has around 1,000 members living in the Deer Lodge-Anaconda area.

The pay plan’s success 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 Feaver. “We worked hard to get Schweitzer and a Democratic Legislature [elected], and we did that to get a better deal for state employees.”