Salaries Increment Not the Solution to the Doctors Strike

Kenyan Doctors are on strike again. At the centre of the tussle is a disputed 300% pay increase they claim was promised to them through a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) made in 2013. And even though we miss the graphic and creative ambulation that characterize teachers' strike, there is no gainsaying that the strike hasn't been short of jokes and mirth.

Tough-talking union leaders have remained pervasive regardless of the profession. Take the 'Lipa Kama Tender' placard for instance that has elicited enormous reactions from the public. Not lost in these reactions is the debate about whether or not the doctors pay demand is valid and the taunting argument about medicine being a calling and not just another career. The latter argument has now turned to be a source of pathological chagrin to doctors who must contend with the sight of individuals with less demanding careers earning astronomical amounts in salaries and allowances.

Additionally, it does not help that there are constitutionally mandated bodies with qualified professionals such as the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) which can competently mediate the problem of public servants' pay. But Kenyans recall that the Sarah Serem-led Commission was arm-twisted and blackmailed by members of the National and County Assemblies before. The blame-game between the various arms of Government and the Council of Governors has only served to make the sight of a solution more elusive.

But are doctors justified to demand a 300% pay increase?

It is easy to drag a moral perspective into this dispute. The sight of dying patients and the anguish of relatives is a heart-wrenching spectacle and can only serve to make the doctors’ perspective hard to canvas. But sticking out like the pyramids in the desert is the question about our 'societal values' in the pay debate.

However, our 'effort-reward' environment is so polluted by greed that relying on behavioral economics to define motivation is an anguish no utilitarian theorist wants to endure. Elementary behavioral economics encompasses such theories as 'loss aversion' which postulates that people react differently to losses and gains of equal size, such that people feel losses more keenly than gains of equal magnitude.

The tendency is always to try and perpetuate the status quo. Gone are the days when medicine was the esteemed profession. Doctors moan the loss of prestige and the halo effect the profession had in its early days that no amount of compensation will remedy.

As long as corruption and the allure of quick riches continue to trample over 'value-driven' professionalism, strikes by many other professionals will remain a permanent feature of our labour relations calendar. Such reports like some politicians and their henchmen regaling in ill-gotten wealth just a few months after elections, while cartels and 'tenderpreneurs' recruit 'swindlers' through paid adverts in major newspapers, makes the pay debate dreadful to pursue.