A MEDICAL TRADE UNION

Auckland Star, Volume XLIII, Issue 307, 24 December 1912, Page 4

A MEDICAL TRADE UNION

The British Medical Association has now finally rejected the terms offered to the doctors by Mr. Lloyd Ooorge under tbe National Insurance scheme. This is in itself a serious development, of whiA the full effect can be estimated only in the light of subsequent events. But our present purpose is not to enter into the complex details of this controversy, but to draw attention to the policy that the RM.A. is adopting to enforce its views.

Not. content-with doing. its best to. wreck the National Insurance scheme, the B.M.A. is reported to have resolved "to boycott all insured patients in all the hospitals, excepting cases of urgent illness or the really necessitous poor.'' We do not wonder that the "Daily News" and other Liberal organs have denounced the tactics of the B.M.A. in very vigorous

terms. But our present object is lo point out that by its action the B.M.A. has placed itself precisely in the position of au ordinary industrial organisation. It is a close corporation, members claim the right lo demand a certain scale of wages, and to enforce their claims by the methods that industrial unions have already made their own in the strike and the boycott. We do riot propose to consider just now whether such a line of action is consistent with the original purposes of the organisation or compatible with the dignity of the honourable profession to which its members belong. But wo may point out th3t by adopting this line of policy the B.M.A. has rendered itself amenable to the treatment to which labour organisations are compelled to submit when they run counter to public opinion, or when their policy conflicts with the public interest. In a short time, if the B.M.A. persists, we will have the learned professions brought under the operation of ordinary- industrial law?; and. in the last resort, we will find the State solving the interminable difficulties that must then arise in the only practicable way by nationalising medicine and surgery as a profession '"en bloc." It is a very serious question for the members of the profession to decide whether their ! loyalty to the B.M.A. is worth such risks as this by no means remote contingency .seems to threaten.