Doctors warn of indefinite strike

Simebal President Isidro Torres confirmed in the morning that the union's Executive Committee has given its official seal of approval to the industrial action.

He added though that “the door remains open” for the Balearic government for further negotiations if they wish to avoid strike action and the resulting chaos.” The row has been sparked by Balearic government moves to deprive the doctors of bonus payments, a move first mooted in 2008 by the previous Socialist coalition government but which was never officially ratified.

José Ramón Bauzá, the President of the present Partido Popular government said that the ruling in 2008 to stop the extra pay for doctors had been given by the High Court and that all extra pay received since that time should be returned to the government.

However, the Socialists, now in opposition, warned that were the present government to take such steps and dock the doctors' pay, they would take the government to court. The Socialists pointed out that the extra pay had been awarded to the doctors even after the Partido Popular came to power but this month, the bonus was stopped.

Torres claimed that staff at all medical centres in the Balearic Islands, both large and small, had backed strike action. He said that staff were simply asking that they be given a “normal salary.” At the time the Socialists voiced their opposition to the government docking doctors' pay, it was claimed that one of the reasons the High Court ruling was never put into action was due to the recognition that doctors' salaries in the Balearic Islands fell below the mainland equivalent. The “bonus” was seen by doctors in the Balearics not so much as extra pay, but remuneration to match the pay of professionals elsewhere in Spain.

Torres said that if the doctors were made to return their extra pay, the amounts involved would be what he described as “scandalous”. “It would mean that doctors at health centres on Minorca, Ibiza and Formentera would have to find between 30'000 and 50'000 euros to give back to the government and those working on Majorca would need to return between 20'000 and 25'000.

President Bauzá has also been criticised for treating the pay dispute with Balearic doctors insensitively. The Socialists have said that Bauzá is using heavy-handed tactics, trying to group medics in the same bracket as all other industrial workers, categorizing them as “proletariat” rather than professionals.