Nurses embark on strike over unpaid salaries

Members of the Coalition of Unpaid Nurses and Midwives have declared an indefinite nationwide strike effective Wednesday to demand unpaid salaries.

According to the group, which is made up of over 7,000 nurses, the strike has been necessitated by government’s failure to honour its pledge to pay them when they embarked on a similar strike in October last year.

The group however called off the strike after a week when the Controller and Accountant General announced that it had released an amount of GHc756, 000 to pay them.

But the National Coordinator of the group, Douglas Adu-Fokuo said in an interview on Citi FM that “only 30 percent of the 7,000 were paid.”

Thus, he explained that the strike was the only way through which they could draw government’s attention to the condition since negotiations with government officials had stalled.

“We are embarking on this strike because the negotiations we were having with government officials and authorities involved have failed and we can’t continue. Every day, we are given unfulfilled promises; enough of the promise. This time we want to see action. We want to see the money reflecting in our accounts before we call off the strike, if not we will still be in our homes and we won’t go to work,” he said.