Solidarity with the Junior Doctors!

Preface

The pamphlet reproduced here was disseminated by the Party in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, during the industrial action undertaken by junior doctors from April 8th to 10th, 2025. The strike, declared illegal by the Fair Work Commission (FWC), was the first of its kind in NSW in 25 years. 

The doctors demand a 30% wage increase from the current $38/hr to bring their pay in line with their comrades in other states: $42 in Victoria and $45 in Queensland.

Predictably, the Labor Government, as they did recently with the nurses, denounced the doctor’s as ‘selfish’, accusing them of endangering patients. The FWC, in their role, declared the strike illegal, threatening punitive measures unless the action was abandoned, and negotiations were returned to. 

Junior doctors in Australia, however, regularly work outside of their contracted hours, with 10-12-14 hour days commonplace without compensation. This pedagogical practice was once rationalised as a rite of passage with the promise of future professional autonomy, social prestige, and economic prosperity. Yet these promises are increasingly elusive. 

Austerity measures and intensified workloads have eroded these privileges, reducing junior doctors to conditions like their fellow proletariat: they are no longer a special caste. The material reality has eroded the very distinctions that once justified their exploitation. As in any factory driven by the dictates of surplus value extraction, the pace of work has become more intense. In private facilities, the resulting accumulation of wealth is evident, yet the state, as the main employer of doctors, seems less involved. But, according to the old mole method, we see that there are no real differences.

Hence, hospitals are no different from the factories in their usage of increasingly unpaid surplus-labour for the creation of capital. 

The Australian worker still has, on average, little class consciousness, and none more so than the young doctors on strike, who fell straight into a carefully orchestrated manoeuvre by the newly elected union leadership. The strike was inevitable, but whether it would be rank-and-file  or organised was left to the officials, who chose between chaos or a controlled explosion.

Declared ‘illegal’ by the state, the action was nevertheless  sanctioned after 18 months of fruitless negotiations and one of the most expensive elections in the union’s history. The change in leadership allowed the strike to proceed—less as a show of militancy but as a desperate attempt to stem growing distrust from below. In this we see their opportunism: the strike was not meant to win, but to pacify; not to confront, but to contain. With inflation biting deep, failure to act would have meant mass defections—perhaps even toward a union of a different kind, one forged closer to the rank and file, on the road to the red union.

Nevertheless, the striking tactics utilised see it doubtful that their immediate demands will be achieved.

The recent nurses’ struggle is a clear example. Their initial demand, a one-off 15% pay rise, was quickly watered down under the leadership of the NSW Nurses’ Union (NSWNMA), which insisted on maintaining ‘good faith’ with the state. In the end, they organised only three legal strikes, tightly controlled, scheduled a month in advance and lasting only one day each over the course of the year.

Predictably, this was not enough.

On the floor, the mood is bitter; their demand reduced to scraps. The energy has bled out. At best, they may walk away with a deal that barely keeps pace with inflation.

And yet, of the two, it is the nurses who may emerge better positioned. The doctors, having had their demand for a strike nominally ‘met,’ now renew their trust in the leadership—trust that will take years to undo. The nurses, by contrast, have begun to grasp, if only subconsciously, that their union no longer represents them. 

The union action showed a lack of organisation, and the tactics employed were characterised by confusion and a lack of direction. Without the intervention of the Party, workers were left free to adopt tactics aimed not at confronting capital, but at arousing sympathy. The strikers marched through the streets, seeking public approval, rather than denying entry and thus the use of labour in the hospital. The legal status of these actions, as always, was defined by the ruling class itself, whose aim is not to arbitrate fairly, but to suppress any movement that threatens its control.

In any case, it will be up to the current and future generations of workers and comrades to relearn this lost knowledge; to once again understand the operatives they have as the working class. The regional nature of this text mustn’t lose its understanding in the spirit of international solidarity.

* * *

Solidarity with the Junior Doctors!

From April 8th to April 10th, junior doctors in NSW will engage in a three-day strike demanding a necessary and justified 30% pay increase. This is the first strike by NSW junior doctors in 25 years, and notably, it sees senior and junior doctors uniting on the picket line. The Fair Work Commission has already declared this strike illegal, threatening punitive measures unless the workers abandon their industrial action and return to negotiations. The Minns Labor government cynically denounces the striking doctors as ‘selfish’, accusing them of endangering patients.

We respond unequivocally: Full support to the striking doctors! Reject the threats of the Commission and the hypocritical denunciations by the Labor government! 

Under the austerity measures dictated by successive governments—most recently accelerated by the Labor administration—workers have borne the full brunt of capitalist crises. Despite Labor’s empty promises to ease the soaring cost of living, austerity has been selectively imposed only upon the working class. Doctors, once somewhat insulated by their professional status, now suffer declining wages, gruelling workdays of up to 14 hours, and relentless institutional pressures designed solely to ensure profitability and efficiency.

The deterioration of conditions within healthcare is not accidental; it is the deliberate consequence of capitalism, which treats health as merely another sector for profit extraction. Doctors, nurses, wardies—all hospital workers—face increasing exploitation and alienation, forced into ever-lower wages and longer hours.

Yet, wage increases alone, though necessary, are insufficient. They represent only temporary solace. To truly address the exploitation at hand, workers must expand the struggle beyond immediate economic demands for a single category of workers and confront capitalism directly as a class. Historically, sector-specific strikes—such as those by wharfies or the tradies—have yielded only limited gains precisely because they remained isolated within their industries. Without extending these struggles across sectors, breaking the artificial divisions imposed by employers, the workers are defeated.

Labor governments, far from protecting workers’ interests, consistently expose their true role as defenders of capitalist exploitation. Prepared by decades of Coalition policies and entrenched by the 2009 Fair Work Act, Labor actively intensifies exploitation under the guise of moderation. The Minns government’s recent dismissive response to nurses’ wage demands exemplifies this pattern, deliberately offering piss-poor drafts, prolonging the negotiations, thereby losing traction among the workers for a settlement significantly less than initially demanded. The union leadership, in their role, maintains this very system and corals the workers into this prefigured equation.

To achieve meaningful and lasting victories, junior doctors and all healthcare workers must therefore demand:

• A substantial, universal pay increase for all healthcare workers.
• Full compensation for all overtime hours worked.
• The immediate abolition of unpaid internships and exploitative training practices.
• A significant reduction in working hours with no loss of pay.
• Significant new employment for every healthcare section to ensure the demands are maintained.

These demands, essential to workers’ wellbeing, cannot be met by isolated or short-term strikes. They require a general and indefinite mobilisation, transcending occupational and sectoral boundaries imposed by capitalism. Recent industrial actions—such as those by NSW nurses and Sydney transport workers—reflect broader, shared grievances within the proletariat. The capitalist class fears precisely, though not yet here, the united and generalised resistance.

The ruling class responds with legal threats, media vilification, and intimidation precisely because it recognises the revolutionary potential inherent in the working-class united front. The right to strike is never freely granted by capitalist institutions; it is a weapon workers must seize to combat capitalist oppression. And the limitations imposed by the Fair Work Commission are designed explicitly to contain and neutralise workers’ resistance, with the recent CFMEU debacle exemplary. 

Strikers! It is in your interest and precise duty for the working class to keep on your demands and expand the strike!

The bourgeoisie fears nothing more than a unified proletariat with its vanguard. The State, the Labor Party, the Fair Work Commission, and opportunist (thereby bourgeois) union leaders tremble before the possibility of genuine solidarity and organised resistance. As economic pressures inevitably intensify, pushing workers deeper into precarity, these bourgeois shills’ charades only conceal and perpetuates capitalism’s fundamental contradictions.

Only through a decisive and united class struggle, led independently by class-based unions against the capitalist institutions and opportunist union leaders, can workers achieve genuine victories. The junior doctors’ strike, therefore, represents not merely an isolated demand for better pay but a critical step toward confronting capitalism itself. Immediate economic demands, crucial as they are, must ultimately advance towards dismantling capitalist exploitation and realising revolutionary abolition of capitalism towards the end of the society divided into classes. 

SOLIDARITY WITH THE JUNIOR DOCTORS’ STRIKE!

GENERALISE THE STRUGGLE NATIONALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY!

TOWARD CLASS UNIONS, CLASS UNITY, AND REVOLUTIONARY ACTION LED BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY!