1,700 Blacks Reinstated by South African Hospital

Hospital authorities have reinstated 1,700 black student nurses and auxiliary workers who were fired for protesting salary and working conditions, the workers’ lawyer said today.

“I don’t think it is a victory. It was their right not to have lost their jobs in the first place,” the lawyer, Ismail Ayob, told a news conference.

He said the workers at Baragwanath Hospital, serving Johannesburg’s sprawling black Soweto township, were reinstated without loss of benefits after a Supreme Court judge ruled today that their firings were invalid because they were backdated to before the protests.

Troops moved in to cook and clean at Baragwanath after the workers were involved in violent protests on Nov. 13 and were fired.

Amid confusion over what action the workers took and how many joined in, Ayob denied that they had gone on strike.

The auxiliary workers were protesting over pay, saying some of them were earning $58 a month, while nurses were angry at their living and working conditions.

Judge Richard Goldstone today gave a ruling critical of the authorities’ handling of the crisis, which led to troops being called in to cook and clean at the 3,000-bed hospital, reserved for blacks under apartheid.

The nurses’ contracts say that they must not strike, and Goldstone said: “Nursing is a venerable and noble profession. . . . The lives or health of many people could be endangered by strike action. It undermines the ethics of their calling.”

But, he added, this increased the hospital’s responsibility to ensure that the nurses had the benefit of reasonable conditions and to listen to their grievances, however petty it considered them.