Dionne Rose, Staff Reporter

Left: Dr. Myrton Smith, president of Jamaica Medical Doctors Association. - Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer.   Right: Edith Allwood-Anderson, president of the Nurses Association of Jamaica. - Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer

Junior doctors yesterday told the president of the Nurses Association of Jamaica (NAJ) to butt out of their wage negotiations with the Government and branded as unfair, Edith Allwood-Anderson's advice to other public sector employees to agree to salary contracts.

"I think that when it comes to negotiation, each group should leave the other's business alone," Dr. Myrton Smith, the president of the Jamaica Medical Doctors Association (JMDA), told The Gleaner.

Teachers and the police, two other signi-ficant public sector groups still in pay negotiations, declined to comment on Allwood-Anderson's suggestion that they settle.

Full context

Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA) president, Hopeton Henry, said he would want to first examine the nurses' pay agreement, while Police Federation chairman, Corporal Raymond Wilson, wanted to have the full context of the remarks before responding.

After weeks of often bad-tempered negotiations with the administration, including at least two sickouts and a threat to boycott proposed arbitration hearings, the NAJ on Tuesday signed a new wage contract that will give its members a 19 per cent increase on basic salary in year one and five per cent increase in year two, plus fringe benefits.

As she inked the agreement with Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies, Allwood-Anderson, having pulled her organisation out of the Jamaica Conference of Trade Union (JCTU) over disagreement with a wage pact it had reached for state-paid employees, urged other groups to settle within the ambit of the same JCTU package she had rejected.

Follow suit

Since nurses were worse off than other public sector employees, she suggested, it would be the responsibility of other groups to follow suit. Allwood-Anderson's argument angered Dr. Smith.

"I don't think it is fair to comment on other groups' negotiations," he said, pointing to Allwood-Anderson's actions when she believed nurses were not properly represented by the JCTU and that the NAJ had to fight on its own behalf.

Even as they rejected Government pay offers, Dr. Smith said, junior doctors had remained on the job.

Meanwhile, JMDA members were meeting late yesterday to decide whether they would accept or reject the Government's latest wage offer. Dr. Smith had told The Gleaner previously that the Government had not improved its wage offer of 12 per cent in year one and eight per cent in year two. There was, however, some improvement on fringe benefits, he said then.