Berlin’s Senator for Health Dilek Kalayci has rejected criticism of the working conditions in her Corona crisis team. The SPD politician admitted that there was a lot of stress and a lot of overtime for her employees. “But it is also due to the pandemic that we cannot say that the crisis management will be discontinued on weekends,” Kalayci said on Monday in the first meeting of the health committee in the House of Representatives after the summer break. “That simply does not work.” The senator firmly rejected the request to disband the crisis team.
In mid-July, staff representatives complained in a kind of fire letter that the employees in the corona crisis team of the health administration were overworked. After one and a half years of work, it was worn out and was in crisis itself, according to the letter from the staff council of the health administration and the main staff council of the country.
The employees are at the end of their tether, their everyday life is determined by “overtime, overtime, on-call duty, work on Sundays and public holidays, on weekends and at unfavorable times”. As a consequence, the staff representatives suggested that the crisis team be dissolved.
“I have to straighten out the picture drawn by this letter,” said Kalayci. “We have great employees in the crisis team who are very committed. You can’t thank each and every one of them enough,” said the senator, whose management style the staff representatives had also criticized.
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According to Kalayci, if the crisis team works seven days a week, that doesn’t mean that every employee works seven days. Additional work in the crisis team was not lacking: “In total, the employees have built up around 29,119 hours of overtime. Currently, 12,007 hours have not yet been paid.” The figures showed, however, that overtime had been reduced through time off or financial compensation. And it was also possible to take a vacation.
“The expectation that we have to cope with a crisis, but the administration is working as always, no weekend, no overtime, that will not work,” said Kalayci. “And that is also our duty as an administration to give everything to the Berliners, organizationally, but also in terms of commitment.”
The health policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, Florian Kluckert, spoke of a “call for help from the Corona crisis team”, which Kalayci should have addressed much earlier and more comprehensively in the delicate situation of the past few months. Instead, she tried to “iron it out”. “Such a letter, which refers to organizational deficiencies, poor management with employees, outbursts of anger or the high workload, is not written without reason.” The Senate Health Administration in Kreuzberg’s Oranienstrasse is a comparatively small administration with fewer than 450 employees. (Tsp/dpa)
