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Morocco Strikes and sit-ins announced in several sectors
Morocco is experiencing turmoil in several sectors, as the Makhzen prepares to face, next week, a series of strikes and sit-ins in the wake of the demonstrations by the angry Moroccan youth movement, which began at the end of last September.
The excitement announced in different sectors comes in a climate marked by a worsening of social unrest and the continuation of a policy of bureaucratic denial in the field of health, as well as an alarming deterioration in the quality of higher education, despite the demonstrations which have been shaking the streets for weeks.
The latter, organized by a youth movement demanding social and territorial justice and accountability, pushed the government to announce budget increases that had no concrete effect.
In the health sector, nursing staff have announced a strike next Tuesday to denounce what the Independent Union of Nurses and Health Technicians describes as a “lack of tangible reforms and deterioration of working conditions”.
This escalation comes after several attacks targeting caregivers in the emergency room of “Sidi Rahal beach” (Casablanca) and at the maternity ward of the “Ouled Aâbou” health center (Berrechid province), which occurred despite repeated calls to strengthen the protection of health personnel in the exercise of their duties.
The Berrechid union estimated, in a press release, that “the health situation in the province suffers from structural dysfunctions requiring urgent intervention”, stressing that the provincial delegation “has still not given real signs of reforms”.
At the same time, and while the Minister of Health and Social Protection continues to present a “good” image of the “global reform of the health system” and “equal access to care”, the reality of the Mother-Child service at the Abi El Kacem-Ezahraoui provincial hospital in Ouezzane contradicts these speeches, revealing a collapse of the public service.
The health crisis in this hospital can be summed up in a striking image: a single doctor for more than 274,000 inhabitants, in conditions described by nurses as “painful and inhumane”. With each complicated birth, the establishment is put to the test of a race against death, with the medical teams alone bearing the weight of a failing system.
The provincial office of the National Public Health Union in Ouezzane, affiliated with the Democratic Federation of Labor (FDT), warned of “a catastrophic situation threatening the collapse of the public service”.
The union held the Health Ministry “fully responsible for any possible complications or deaths”, accusing it of “managing the crisis with bureaucratic indifference”.
The higher education sector is not immune to this rise in protest. The local office of the National Union of Higher Education (SNESup) in El Jadida announced a strike for next Thursday, accompanied by a sit-in in front of the rectorate of Chouaib-Doukkali University.
Tension is particularly high at the Higher School of Education and Training of the same university, where the union published a press release denouncing “unprecedented administrative degradation” and “persistent indifference to the demands of teachers”
The press release specified that the emergency meeting held with the director of the establishment “did not lead to any concrete results”, adding that “the absence of serious treatment of the accumulated problems led to a paralysis of daily functioning and a worsening of the climate of internal tension”.
The union also denounced “the marginalization of teacher-researchers by the rectorate”, through the refusal to validate training and research projects without justification or response within the legal deadlines.