The strike at two private hospitals at Kochi and Kolencherry underscores the total neglect of the needs of nurses in Kerala, considered the granary of nurses. It is the success of such strikes in cities like Delhi and Kolkata and in some other hospitals in Kerala last year that encouraged them to go on a strike. Nurses were one of the least organised sections of the working class, enabling hospital managements everywhere to exploit them. What forced them to unite and come under the banner of the United Nurses Association is the cruel attitude of managements. Take the case of one of the private hospitals which boasts about its five-star facilities but refuses to pay a BSc nurse even `8,000 a month. As private hospitals refuse to pay even the statutory minimum wages fixed for skilled and highly-skilled workers in medical institutions, nurses get a pittance by way of salary. Worse, their service conditions are horrible with no security of tenure. It is a common practice for some hospitals to keep the certificates of the nurses they employ so that they are not able to apply for jobs elsewhere. Even the slightest lapse on the part of a nurse invites the severest punishment from managements. Two nurses of a five-star hospital in Delhi were sacked for the serious offence of talking to each other in their mother-tongue. The dismissal of some striking nurses in Kerala reflects the same mind- set. State labour minister Shibu Baby John’s statement that Essential Services Maintenance Act would not be used against the strike is hardly a consolation. His department cannot absolve itself of the responsibility when, in a state where an unskilled labourer gets `500 per day, a qualified general nurse is paid `4,000 a month. The stepmotherly treatment the government meets out to the nurses is borne out by the fact that it has not reserved any post for BSc and MSc nurses in its hospitals. It is the government’s failure to fix minimum wages for nurses in various categories of hospitals that has resulted in the present strike.