SOME two hundred nurses, midwives, and lab workers held a protest on Main Street in Košice, in the vicinity of the seat of the Constitutional Court on October 10. They called on the court to rule as soon as possible on the constitutionality of the law by which the previous government increased their salaries, the SITA newswire reported.
The Constitutional Court is expected to rule on the law after a motion was filed by the general prosecutor, encouraged by the physicians’ chamber. In the meantime, the court has suspended the law.
Nurses have been fighting for higher salaries for 20 years, said the president of the Chamber of Nurses and Midwives, Mária Lévyová.
“We used negotiations and legal proceedings in promoting our rightful requirements,” Lévyová said as quoted by SITA. “Politicians agreed to the solution of our requirements and nobody doubted it. In the end the law increasing our salaries was passed. The verdict of the Constitutional Court that suspended the effectiveness of the law has halted our progress. We require the Constitutional Court to act as fast as possible and if possible, to rule by the end of this year, so that the discontent among nurses doesn’t grow to immense proportions.”
The court’s ruling cannot be sped up by any protests, said Constitutional Court’s spokesperson Anna Pančurová, adding that there are several motions waiting to be resolved that were filed earlier than the one concerning the nurses, SITA wrote.
