MEXICO CITY (appro) Mexico who protested this Friday to demand the labor improvements that the now former head of government promised them and, they said, did not comply.
The protests that jeopardized important roads and transportation lines in various parts of the capital occurred a week after Sheinbaum Pardo signed the agreement to integrate the CDMX health system into the IMSS-Welfare system. It was his penultimate public act at the head of the capital’s government before leaving office to seek the Presidency of the Republic in 2024.
The blockades began early in the morning outside or around the Legaria Pediatric Hospital, Topilejo, Xochimilco Maternal and Pediatric Hospital, Gregorio Salas, Moctezuma, Iztapalapa, Inguarán, Balbuena, Hospital de la Mujer, Ajusco Medio, and General de Tláhuac.
Among the posters read: “Immediate Basification Payroll 8. Interim”, “We want to work with a union basis”, “We demand salary homologation.”
Balbuena Hospital staff brought a blanket with 11 demands:
- Improve general working conditions for all staff.
- Bases with union digit for the entire workforce.
- Functional medical equipment with all the necessary supplies.
- Opening of the 3rd floor.
- Supplies for all services (from cleaning to the medical area).
- Increase in the salaries of senior staff.
- Recognition of years of seniority worked.
- Fair, dignified and equitable salaries for all staff.
- Functional X-ray equipment with all the supply of supplies permanently.
- Total and continuous service of tomography and resonance.
- Retroactive pay for all staff who are owed.
According to testimonies from the protesters, there are cases in which the local governments promised them the basification for seven years and are still waiting, while other more recent employees have already been given that benefit. Some more criticized that nurses and paramedics only earn between 8,000 and 10,000 pesos a month.
Other doctors and nurses argued that during the covid-19 pandemic they were called “heroes” for caring for the population; however, that was not reflected in the promised job improvements.
Some lockdowns lasted just over six hours. The group of medical personnel that obstructed the passage on the Mexico-Cuernavaca highway was withdrawn by police from the Secretariat of Citizen Security (SSC), amid some shoving and shouting.
Sedesa proposes dialogue tables
At 4:00 p.m., the Ministry of Health (Sedesa) reported that all the blockades had been released and that during the demonstrations “services were not affected and patients continue to receive care without interruptions.”
At 9 a.m., the unit led by Oliva López assured that it “maintains dialogue with health personnel who have doubts about the process of transferring services to the IMSS-Welfare” and reiterated that the priority is to continue medical care for patients.
In a computer card, he insisted that dialogue tables have been held with Citizen Concertation personnel from the Government, Administration and Finance secretariats and the Headquarters.
They, he added, “have made it clear that there is a commitment to labor improvements” and the follow-up to the proposals of the protesters with informative assemblies from different hospitals to “analyze particular cases and resolve doubts.”
Finally, the Sedesa reiterated its “willingness” to inform medical personnel of the scope of the implementation of the new health system, “whose main objective is to guarantee the right to health” of the citizens of the capital.
It is “confusion”: Government
In a conference, the head of government, Martí Batres, defended that the necessary changes to adhere to the IMSS-Welfare “will allow better conditions for workers. Each health worker is going to have a secure position and this is going to be an important process. Some information still needs to be downloaded, but we want to point out that, according to what we have discussed with federal authorities, this process means that there will be safe positions for all health workers.
The person in charge of the office of the Secretary of Government, Luis Ruiz, assured that among the medical personnel there is distortion of information:
“Some sectors have been alarmed that labor rights are going to be lost because the conditions that some others have at this time are not going to be given. I want to point out with this that a fundamental job of the city government together with the federal authorities is to inform all sectors on the subject”.
He revealed that yesterday he was present at a meeting of more than five hours with representatives of the city’s hospitals, where “doubts were clarified, the bases of the transition were set out very clearly and very precisely the a working minute with the participation of representatives of all the hospitals where four central issues were established”, he added.
Among those issues is the promise that there will be “places for everyone who already works” in the system; there will be no layoffs.
