The state-owned Vivantes clinics do not come to rest – the spectacular nursing strike is still casting a shadow after a year. According to Tagesspiegel information, a dispute is looming between employee representatives and HR management because a well-known strike leader was warned in August.
Silvia Habekost has been a nurse for almost 35 years and has worked at the Friedrichshain Hospital for 20 years, which has belonged to Vivantes since the state group was founded in 2001. Habekost sat on the Vivantes supervisory board as an employee representative until spring 2022 and is one of the best-known heads of the hospital movement that arose around the strike by the Verdi union in the Vivantes clinics and the Charité in 2021.
The anesthetic nurse has been warned because she is said to have made publicly “untrue” statements about the collective agreement that was struck at the time. According to information from the Tagesspiegel, a letter from the human resources department states that Habekost spoke to the alternative “tageszeitung” about the collective agreement between Vivantes and Verdi – and in doing so violated the usual requirement for consideration, damaging the reputation of the clinic chain, i.e. accepting it .
Habekost rejected the allegations and largely confirmed the process to the Tagesspiegel. She pointed out that Verdi and the Vivantes works council will comment on the cause later this week. A spokeswoman for the Vivantes clinics said that one was not allowed to comment on individual personnel issues.
As reported, the relief collective agreement for intensive care units, for example, stipulates that a registered nurse must take care of a maximum of 1.8 patients per shift. Otherwise there is time off and salary compensation. On average there are 2.5 patients so far. Like most hospital operators, Vivantes is urgently looking for staff, but there are hardly any on the job market.
The Neuköllner Linke had spoken on Tuesday that the staff shortage in the local Vivantes clinic – one of the largest hospitals in Germany – also led to serious hygiene deficiencies. Bed rooms and operating rooms were not cleaned sufficiently. A Vivantes spokeswoman said that the cleaning staff had actually been in short supply in the past few weeks due to “Covid-19 illnesses, the holiday season and the generally tense labor market situation”. You adapt area plans for cleaning: “Administrative areas and stairways or unoccupied areas are currently not cleaned as often as usual.”
There is also a dispute about wages in the Vivantes subsidiaries for cleaning. Verdi accuses the group management of not paying the full wages agreed for the cleaning staff in 2021. The Vivantes board disagrees, certain surcharges were dropped in the contract signed by the union. On Wednesday, Verdi announced that shortly before an agreement was reached, talks about the classification of the employees of the subsidiaries had collapsed. This would affect around 1,000 of the 18,000 Vivantes employees.
Vivantes operates emergency rooms in each of its eight large clinics, which are among the most frequented in the capital region. The situation there is also tense, partly because masses of patients come to the emergency services who, from a medical point of view, are not emergencies.
