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KNUN Secretary General Seth Panyako. [PHOTO: STANDARD/FILE]
By LONAH KIBET
NAIROBI, KENYA: Nurses have issued a seven-day strike notice, accusing the Government of illegally altering their terms and conditions of service.
The nurses, through their union, claimed that the Government is ‘harassing’ them and other health workers without any regard to their constitutional rights.
Kenya National Union of Nurses (KNUN) said their members who had received pay slips were shocked to realise that some allowances had not been paid while others were slashed. “While some of our members have not yet received their January salaries, those who have been paid have not received their uniform, hardship and medical risk allowances. The extraneous allowances were either drastically slashed or not paid at all. The Government has neither consulted us nor given our members the reasons behind the reductions in writing as required by the Constitution,” said KNUN secretary general Seth Panyako.
Panyako added that the pay slips received so far are from the county governments while they are employees of the national government.
He accused the Transition Authority, Ministry of Health and Public Service Commission (PSC) of working together to unconstitutionally dismantle the national healthcare referral system.
OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION
“The county government was given level one, which deals with primary healthcare. We will not allow the national government to dismantle even one single health facility that belongs to the national healthcare referral system. This is war that we shall fight to the end,” said Panyako.
The union representatives claim that no single health worker has received any official communication from the PSC or the concerned ministry, showing they have either been seconded or transferred to the county government.
“The county governments are busy purporting to be employers of health workers by producing fake and illegal pay slips. These activities by the Government are clearly a violation of our laws,” said Panyako. “We want to assure them the only thing we want to be told is that salaries of all nurses and their allowances have been paid in full,” he added. The nurses said if the Government does not reverse its decision to chop their salaries by Friday, nurses would not go to work Monday morning.
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