Zimbabwe health workers strike after rejecting 100% pay rise

HARARE, June 20 (Reuters) – Zimbabwean wellbeing staff went on strike on Monday immediately after rejecting a 100% wage hike present past 7 days, urgent their demand for payment in U.S. dollars as the neighborhood forex slumps.

Zimbabwe’s major nurses’ union urged the government to negotiate and warned that lives would be shed if the dispute was not fixed immediately.

The government and wellbeing employees are at an deadlock following inflation jumped to 131.7% in May well, a grim echo of the hyperinflation that wiped out people’s financial savings a ten years ago.

Govt workers rejected the below-inflation 100% wage hike offer on Friday.

At Sally Mugabe Hospital in Harare, patients trying to find remedy sat in the courtyard even though health professionals, nurses, radiographers and pharmacists remaining their workplaces to protest.

“The salaries that the health and fitness workers been given past week were being pathetic,” Enock Dongo, head of the Zimbabwe Nurses’ Association, instructed Reuters, introducing that the vast majority were being paid out 20,000 Zimbabwe pounds ($53) a month.

He reported wellness specialists throughout the country experienced decided to strike until eventually they ended up compensated US$540 a thirty day period, the fork out they utilized to acquire in 2018 before the nearby forex slumped.

A authorities spokesperson did not quickly react to a ask for for comment.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who took in excess of from longtime leader Robert Mugabe in a 2017 coup, has struggled to close an economic crisis that started out underneath his predecessor.

($1 = 378.0000 Zimbabwe dollars)

Reporting by Nyasha Chingono Modifying by Anait Miridzhanian and Nick Macfie

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