Sitting on a picnic blanket with seventeen of his colleagues last summer, David Wetzel began to think that this time, their campaign for better working conditions could actually win.

A nurse in the cancer ward at a campus of Berlin’s Charité hospital, Wetzel had lived the daily reality of understaffing since he first started training. On a typical day shift, he’s responsible for the care of ten or eleven patients. On night shifts there are twenty-one. The German oncologists’ association says that on a day shift, one cancer nurse should be looking after no more than five patients.

“You get into a situation where you think, there is so much to do that I can’t give any more,” he told Jacobin. “I can no longer have conversations in the way I would want to. I say I’ll do things that I then can’t do at all, because I simply have too many patients to look after.”