Readers are invited to submit letters to The Guardian.
Letters may be e-mailed to guardian@cpa.org.au.
Letters of 300-400 words are preferred.

Letters to the Editor:

State violence against nurses

Our nurses are working overtime and double shifts due to lack 
of staff to relieve them. There is not enough time for lunch, tea 
or even toilet breaks until they finish work. Because of 
insufficient government funds to hospitals and inadequate 
staff/patient ratios, nurses are required to work beyond safety 
levels.

In Midwifery, two midwives are all that the government sees as 
necessary to care for three labouring women. Labouring women 
require constant one-on-one care to ensure the health and well 
being of both the mother and the baby.

The staffing requirements are assessed three times a day and, if 
there are any empty beds, staff can be redeployed elsewhere in 
the hospital, often to areas that require different skill levels. 
This means that the nurse/midwife and the patients are at risk.

Often, as soon as the "assessor" has left the ward area, several 
women are admitted in labour, with no adequate staffing to cover 
their needs. My daughter is a midwife who will not leave a mother 
in labour when there is no midwife to relieve her.

A maternity unit is an intensive care area and women deserve to 
be given excellent care to ensure the safe birth of their baby. 
Many incidents occur directly because of insufficient staff to 
care for the patients.

Midwives are becoming increasingly stressed due to constant 
pressure from administrators who will not meet required levels of 
staffing due to budget restraints.

Many midwives are leaving the profession because of these 
pressures. Agency staff can not be employed to fill vacant roster 
positions or annual leave -- only sick leave. This means that an 
understaffed ward remains continuously understaffed until more 
staff are employed. Unfortunately, finding a midwife is extremely 
difficult.

These situations occur right across the health system. Dedicated 
nurses in every area are feeling the pressure and are leaving the 
profession because they cannot give patients the safe and 
efficient care they would like to.

Government intransigence forced nurses to commence work bans so 
that safe and effective staff/patient ratios, e.g. five nurses to 
20 patients in general wards and one midwife to one labouring 
woman, can be the norm.

In spite of budget restrictions, governments must ensure that 
hospitals receive essential funding, especially in ensuring an 
effective staff/patient ratio.

Nancye Smith
Aberfeldie, Victoria

Karl Marx described surplus value as unpaid labour power, the 
capacity for labour as the aggregate of those mental and physical 
capabilities in human beings which are exercised whenever use 
value is produced of any description.

When homo sapiens came down from the trees, they stood erect, 
used a stone or stick to gather food, and find shelter.

The modern worker, he or she, must also gather food, eat, be clad 
and sheltered to maintain life.

Food, clothing and shelter are not free. They are bought as goods 
and services for a percentage of the commodity and the worker 
sells to the owners of the means of production. That percentage 
is the weekly wage.

In a 40-hour working week, the worker is paid for four hours for 
his labour power, the commodity that he sells, and the boss gets 
the 36 hours in surplus value.

The old time judge Higgins who presided over the Harvester Award, 
knew a thing or two about surplus (unpaid) labour. He likened the 
work of a hired horse to that of a working person both, he said, 
needed food, water shelter and rest.

The working horse pulls the heavy load for hay.

The worker toils day in day out for the goods and services he 
provides in social production of goods privately owned.

Unpaid labour is the source of untold wealth for the ruling 
class.

In 1516 the British Communist, Sir Thomas Moore, at the beginning 
of the capitalist system, wrote about the perfect and ideal 
system, the utopian phantasy.

Today the struggle for a new and different system of production 
is in use not profit.

Socialism is in the interests of the working people, not in the 
interests of the private appropriation of surplus value. Populus 
iamdulum defutus est. (People have been getting screwed long 
enough)

Phyllis Johnson
Padstow, NSW