KHMU Newsletter <No. 1> January 3, 2020

Happy 2020!

As we celebrate the New Year’s Day, we at the KHMU would like to send brothers and sisters across the world our warmhearted greetings in solidarity. We wish you all the comrades around the world a great victory in the year 2020. Here, we share with you international comrades the KHMU President’s new year’s message to union members.

 

Life over Profit! Let’s go together to create happy hospitals for all: workers, patients and people in Korea.

 

Warm greetings with love to KHMU members,

 

The New Year has dawned. First off, I must send my deepest thanks to you all the union members for working hard all together last year.

 

In early 2019, we at KHMU started struggles to stop opening of the Greenland International Medical Center in Jeju under the slogan that any for-profit hospital must not be established as it will eventually lead to medical service privatization across the nation. Finally, we succeeded in the fight, having the government nullify its approval of the hospital operation.

 

In addition, we gained another success, which is enactment of the healthcare personnel act.

 

In April last year, the Act on the Healthcare Personnel was passed into legislation in 8 years since we proposed the draft version of the act. The government recognized the serious issues led by a low level of staffing in hospitals and committed to solving the relevant problems under the Act. As the act is being implemented, it is now the time for us to rigorously deal with and respond to the follow-up processes, e.g., opening of a human resources development institute and survey on actual conditions, so as to see substantial results.

 

Throughout the last year, the KHMU took part in different committees and policy-making bodies including the Specialized Committee on Health and Medical Services under the Presidential Committee on Jobs, Health Insurance Deliberative Committee, Labor-Government Council on Enactment of Act on Healthcare Personnel. In addition, we added effort to settlement and reform of several institutions such as the Healthcare Institutions Assessment System and the Nursing-Care Integrated Service System. By doing so, we successfully accomplished the systemized program on newly hired nurse trainings in public hospitals; additional payment system for night shift nurses except for in Seoul and tertiary polyclinics and concerned guidelines. Meanwhile, we began to discuss possible policies to solve short staffing issues and to implement the maternity leave-considered staffing policy. 

 

In the workplaces, we have developed 4OUT 2OK campaigns (free labor OUT, verbal and physical abuse OUT, tricky certification process OUT, non-regular positions OUT, safety OK, observance to medical laws and regulations OK). As a result, we made success stories and best practices.

 

Looking ahead for the next 10 years, let’s keep working together to take off in 2020.

 

However, other challenges remain to be met. For instance, we, the industry-level union, will gain a victory without fails in our fight for regularizing non-regular job positions in state-run hospitals which we have conducted for over 2.5 years, reinstatement of fired workers who got into the rooftop protest on July 1^st and normalization of union formation and activities in the Yeungnam University Medical Center.

 

We will further discuss strategic plans for the following decade at the regular congress in February. All 70,000 union members! Let’s be together to change the workplaces and the world. Let’s go forward toward “Life over Profit”, “More just and warmer world”, and “More equal world”

Best Wishes for a Happy New Year!

New Year’s Morning in 2020

President Na Sun-ja

The Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union (KHMU)