Demands of Baja Health Workers Met

A two-day work stoppage by 2,350 public health employees in Baja California Norte ended Friday after state officials promised to spend more than half a million dollars to meet the employees’ demands.

“The government has really responded to our demands--and they had to do it in 48 hours,” said a jubilant Senobio Flores, general secretary of the National Health Workers Union in Baja California Norte. “It was thanks to our tenacity and determination and the unanimous support of our members.”

The union represents all personnel in general hospitals and clinics. There are other hospitals for government employees.

Flores said the union resorted to the statewide work stoppage to gain needed supplies and equipment, additional personnel, and back pay and benefits. Union members had complained for more than a year of shortages--everything from uniforms to syringes, gauze and medicine--Flores said.

The funds will give workers a 12% raise, buy supplies and equipment, pay for the workers’ meals and repair the air conditioning at Mexicali General Hospital, officials said.

Shortages in equipment and personnel, irregularities in paychecks and broken air-conditioning units have been the facts of health care in the state for more than a year, health facilities’ employees said.

Tijuana’s General Hospital is a case in point. Opened in 1980, the eight-floor building has never been used to full capacity because of budgetary problems. Only four floors are in use, with about the same number of beds--110--as the old hospital that Tijuana General was built to replace.

Tijuana General employees, in uniform in the hospital’s waiting room Friday but not working, ticked off a litany of woes: Paychecks sent to the wrong state, staff vacancies that are never filled, emergency equipment for only one floor, no antiseptics and no bandages.

“We have a developed a great ability to improvise,” said nurse Trinidad Cornejo.

Public health employees, who are among the worst-paid in their profession in Mexico, have demanded salary parity with workers in hospitals. A doctor at Tijuana General earns about $250 per month--less than half of what the doctors earn at government hospitals for public employees.

In his office at the General Hospital in Tijuana, Director Miguel Angel Robles threw up his hands in frustration as he contemplated the problems he has faced in two years on the job.

There are about 60 vacancies, he said, but bureaucratic paper work in Mexicali, the state capital, has held up the hiring of replacements. The hospital budget, Robles said, was cut from $676,000 in 1984 to $524,000 this year--despite an annual inflation rate of about 30%.

Robles, who earns $420 per month, said the budgetary problems make planning difficult, if not impossible. When the state gave him $15,000 to buy emergency equipment last year, Robles said he had to dip into the fund to pay salaries.

A Chula Vista hospital donated a CAT scan machine to Tijuana General this year, but it sits in storage for lack of $10,000--the cost of installation.

Non-emergency surgery was halted at Tijuana General for several months this year after suppliers cut off the hospital’s credit for lack of payment, Robles said.

Robles, who does yet not know how much his hospital will receive of the $500,000 recently authorized, was grateful for the work stoppage.

“I’m on the employees’ side because they’re fighting for many of the same things I’ve been fighting for,” he said. “Maybe now the authorities will listen when we (directors) tell them about our problems.”