People's health movement (South Africa) supports the public sector's action

The South African Chapter of the People's Health Movement (PHM) strongly supports the demand by public sector health workers (and workers in other public sectors) for a 12% wage increase. While we urge all parties to respect essential services, we also support industrial action if negotiations fail. In this regard we believe that the largest threat to essential services comes primarily not from the threat of industrial action but from the lack of official respect for, and the poor working conditions of, the workers that render them.

We are deeply concerned about the progressive erosion of the public sector since the government's effective abandonment of the Reconstruction and Development Programme and its adoption of the neo-liberal pro-rich and anti-poor macroeconomic policy known as GEAR. While elites have benefited from our economic growth and access to services in the private sector, GEAR has failed in its goals of reducing unemployment and promoting significant redistribution of our national resources. Instead, joblessness has grown, and poverty and social and economic inequalities (root causes of ill health) have increased.

The increasing gap between rich and poor is contributing to a growing burden of disease for South Africans on both sides of the divide. On the one hand, over-consumption leads to an increase in life-style diseases. On the other hand a growing number of children die before their 5th birthdays of diseases of poverty and underdevelopment. At the same time cuts in public spending under GEAR have undermined the quality and quantity of services available to the poor. Our Millennium Development Goal of reducing under-5 mortality by two thirds of the 1990 figure will be impossible to achieve if we don't reverse these trends now.

Our support for the public sector campaign and the action that flows from it is rooted in our conviction that health (defined by the World Health Organization as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity") is a fundamental human right. Furthermore, health involves not only good health care, but also access to a range of fundamental social and economic rights including access to adequate food, clean water and sanitation, housing, education, and a safe and sustainable environment.

As South Africans we are fortunate to have these fundamental rights enshrined in our post-apartheid constitution. But laissez-faire, market-based approaches to the distribution of goods and services inevitably undermine social and economic rights. Implementing them will require an integrated and pro-poor development strategy with an intersectoral approach coordinated and underpinned by government action.

We therefore call for a massive investment in the public sector. We also call for a broad-based national investment aimed at the progressive and sustained realization of the fundamental social and economic rights enshrined in our constitution.

The PHM is a large global civil society network of health activists supportive of the WHO policy of Health for All and organised to combat the economic and political causes of deepening inequalities in health worldwide and revitalise the implementation of WHO’s strategy of Primary Health Care. PHM has embarked on a global campaign for health as a fundamental human right.

The South African Chapter of PHM calls individuals, health workers, progressive organizations in civil society, social groups and community-based organizations and networks who share this view to join the South African part of this global campaign.