Red Statement: A Message To The Ambulance Strike!

Well done to all SIPTU and UNITE ambulance workers for taking strike action.

Workers including Emergency Medical Technicians, Paramedics, Advanced Paramedics, Specialist Paramedics and Paramedic Supervisors are fighting back.

The National Ambulance Service has failed to update salary scales despite an increasing workload on vital frontline workers. You are highly trained and qualified, work in a high stress environment and should be paid accordingly.

It’s a disgrace that essential workers have been left waiting 6 years since an independent report recommended changes to salary scales!

Your escalating strike actions can bring the NAS and HSE to heel and force them to concede to workers’ demands.

But remember the lesson of the school secretaries and caretakers’ strike. Fórsa pulled the pickets and went into talks with the government with nothing at all on the table. The government set a trap and the union tops walked into it.

There was massive public support for the strike and building momentum. The offer of talks was designed to destroy that momentum.

Your strike will also have huge public support. Keep fighting until you get what you want.

That means the strike committee democratically discusses what workers want the union tops to do and to say. We need to put workers in the driving seat of our unions.

For decades the public health service has been run down by government after government. They want to push us all into the hands of private profiteers.

Outsourcing and privatisation have threatened ambulance services, destroyed public services, while overpaid bureaucrats are put in charge of this destruction.

We should be paying frontline workers more, not the likes of HSE boss Anne O’Connor who’s on €420,000!

Imagine a health service where workers were in the driving seat and making the decisions? They’d run it better than the clowns currently in charge!

Every worker needs to stand shoulder to shoulder with the ambulance workers as we fight to put workers in the driving seat of our unions so they fight, to put workers in the driving seat of public services that work for us all.

And to put workers in the driving seat of a socialist, democratically planned economy. We do all the work, we should call the shots. Victory to the ambulance workers!