The Cuban government began to take the first steps to restructure the public health sector as part of a plan of adjustment of the labor force layoffs involving more than half a million state workers until the first quarter of 2011.
First Vice President of the Councils of State and Ministers, Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, the new health minister, Roberto Morales Jedi, general secretary of the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), Salvador Mesa, have held several meetings with workers and public health leaders from around the country to outline the process of adjustment that lies ahead in the sector.
The meetings began in early September in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Guantanamo, Grandma, Hodgkin, Damage and Diego de Avila.
At Guantanamo, Machado Ventura acknowledged that public health would receive a big impact with layoffs, “so inflated their workforce and the number of people who must be relocated.”
A leaked document reveals that the first job cuts in the Ministry of Public Health (Ministry of Public Health) should end on 31 December this year, according to the official schedule. Only in Havana 193 people will lose their jobs.
The sector has 600 thousand workers and it is estimated that an excess of 22,000 workers in Cuban hospitals and clinics. 10 percent of the GDP of the island is dedicated to the public health budget, which some experts consider an untenable situation amidst a landscape of economic crisis and inevitable adjustments in social security.
A former senior official of Public Health, recently filed in Miami, found that layoffs were inevitable.
“Between 55 and 60 percent of the costs are paid wages. The templates are superinfladas years, because politics has always been not to bring anyone. Even doctors cannot provide services due to sickness or aging to remain on the payroll, paid on average. There have never been adjustments or cuts in the sector because it was considered a neoliberal policy, “said the former official, who requested anonymity.
Machado Ventura hinted that layoffs would affect some of the bureaucratic staff.
“It is not uncommon for three or four workers there is a boss, which, far from benefiting harms and hinders the dynamic needs sensitive management and continuing like this,” he said at the meeting in Havana. Havana devotes 20 percent of its budget to health.
The decision on redundancies falls largely on trade unions. Mesa admitted “the challenge of streamlining the templates, so that proceeds with the necessary transparency, without injustice, favoritism, abuse of authority and to preserve the most suitable.
