Danube doctors dilemma
Austria is said to be the land of classical winter unemployment, it might also be called the classical land of strikes. After a whole series of strikes and strike threats in such diverse trades and industries as iron, engineering, mines, hotel and catering, and dairies, a general strike of postal workers was averted only at the eleventh hour. This was when it was shown that the damage to the economy would have been far greater than the “overwork bonus” conceded to the workers after days of negotiations. If only they had been a tiny fraction as obdurate as the Vienna doctors!
These medicos have for over two years been conducting a bitter fight with the City’s Health Service Administration; although primarily a struggle for better pay, they have been fighting also over the form of remuneration proposed by the administration and have refused to continue working under the status of “ salaried employees of the panel.”
In a world where everything is commercialised and state interference is becoming more usual, the creation of national health service administrations is hardly surprising and has spelled an end to the doctors’ former practice of fixing their own fees and collecting their “honorariums” by individual arrangement. “Honorarium” sounds so much better, don’t you think? Apart from the illusion of independence and respectability, it helps to foster the equally false dividing line between the “social status” of doctors and dockers. Now the doctors in Austria are to become salaried state employees and they do not like it one bit.
Most workers of the world have long acquiesced in that degrading way of life —working for wages to secure the necessities of life for themselves and their families. It is deplorable that they should not only tolerate it, but vote repeatedly for its continuation with the inescapable contradictions and incongruities. The resulting social evils include, of course, recurrent crises and war. But do the Vienna doctors share our Socialist viewpoint? No, unfortunately. In any case, unless rebels against this insane set-up can enlist far greater numbers to their ranks and organise politically for its removal, any sections of workers still enjoying a certain independence will sooner or later be engulfed in the mad vortex. And for all their apparent fighting spirit, the doctors seem to be amongst those in the very rear of the revolutionary movement for fundamental change.
Yet they have adopted all the methods used universally by workers in the class struggle, and have demonstrated their identity with the working class. There have been strikes, street demonstrations and marches, even skirmishes at hospitals and collisions with the police. All rather unacademic and undignified, and quite unusual in these intellectual milieux.
When the old Health Insurance Scheme expired in April, the doctors presented their new demands, including what was considered a sensational and hitherto unheard of increase of 65 per cent. in basic salary. The claim was later said to amount even to 88 per cent. It nearly took the panel executives’ breath away and needless to say, after recovering from the shock, they rejected the demand. Hard and fruitless negotiations went on for months. Elections held within the medical profession overwhelmingly confirmed its stubborn radical element, and their solidarity frustrated all the earlier attempts to break their resistance.
Of course, the doctors found no support in the press; an important part of it was even outspokenly hostile to them. Neither did they get any shrift from the so-called “Socialist” politicians. Vice Chancellor Dr. Pittermann, for example, referred to the medicos’ leaders as “that gang” or “clique,” or as “wild demonstrating doctors in white overalls, whose place was in the dispensaries and hospitals.” At the same time, the mass of the population were more or less indifferent, though grumbling because they now had to pay cash down for every consultation or visit, while contributions to the panel had to be paid as before the strike.
No doubt under financial strain after months of struggle, the doctors had to accept a compromise timed provisionally to the end of the year. Nothing even approaching their original demands was obtained. As against their 65 per cent., they were offered 14.6 per cent, and were ordered by the government to “accept and negotiate afterwards.”
Doctors do not as a rule consider themselves as members of the working class; they think they are superior. But on whatever rung of the social ladder they may fancy themselves to be, they are workers and their economic position remains precarious and insecure. Illness, accident, unemployment or other vicissitudes of life under capitalism, imperil the workers’ economic existence, if they do not cause a virtual family catastrophe.. The doctors must learn that neither freelance work nor salaried employment will raise them to the status of our six hundred millionaires, or for that matter of the rest of the Austrian capitalists, for these people do not sell their labour power and therefore do not need to bargain with anybody over its price.
While one must sympathise with the doctor’s (or anyone else’s) struggle for a better life and greater security, the unpalatable fact remains that so long as people are dependent for their living on finding a buyer for the only commodity they possess, their labour power, they cannot share the amenities and the security enjoyed by those who own and control the means of production and who live on surplus value. Their incomes are not endangered by illness and will continue to flow even when they are pleasure cruising around the world.
It may be as hard for doctors as for other potential “rung climbers” to see their fellow academicians and intellectuals in lucrative positions in industry as managers, as heads of state departments, and as ministers getting up to double and treble the average doctor’s income. They see them travelling the world, wining and dining with the big boys in their palaces and mansions. No wonder they feel bitter! But bitterness is not enough. Knowledge is the answer. Knowledge of the capitalist system and how to end it.
R. FRANK