Laurent Gleizes, forty-seven, has been working in Nice’s public hospital system since 1994. But this nurse — a union representative for the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) — says conditions have never been so dire, characterized by pay freezes, overcrowding, and patients’ boiling resentment against staff. That’s why he went on strike last Wednesday, joining dozens of his colleagues across emergency rooms at the city’s four public hospitals — and thousands more workers nationwide.

“We’re calling out management and the government over the lack of both human and material support that are necessary to fulfill our mission of public service,” he told Jacobin at the CGT’s union office in Nice’s Cimiez Hospital. “Working conditions have been declining systematically.”

Many nurses seem to agree — and not just in Nice, where roughly a third of the city’s two hundred public hospital emergency room staffers have gone on strike since Wednesday, according to the CGT. Strikes are also affecting a whopping 203 emergency rooms nationwide, according to a count from a national workers’ coordinating committee in late July. That’s a sizable share of the 478 public emergency health services across France.