Most patients in the hulking, seven-story tuberculosis hospital here -- all infected with potentially lethal, drug-resistant strains of the disease -- have gone home since the majority of nurses, orderlies and janitors went on strike a week-and-a-half ago. Dr. Ruben Naidu, the hospital's chief executive, noted regretfully that the patients being released prematurely were highly contagious. 'Out in the community,' he said, 'they're going to spread the disease.' The missing workers are a small part of a sprawling, nationwide strike by hundreds of thousands of public employees that has paralyzed hospitals and schools across South Africa, undercutting major drives to combat AIDS and TB and to repair a deeply troubled education system. At the tuberculosis hospital here, known as King George V, strikers brandishing whips and sticks chased doctors and nurses off their wards. Some workers, fearing for their lives, hid in locked offices. Services have not recovered. And the strike seems to be intensifying. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, or COSATU, the powerful federation that is part of the governing alliance led by the African National Congress, threatened secondary strikes of manufacturing and mining workers next week if union demands were not met. South Africa's trade union movement has a storied history in the struggle against apartheid, but this season of labor unrest has heightened a deep worry here that the country's proud spirit of ubuntu -- a generous human interconnectedness that flared during the World Cup -- has taken a back seat to materialism. Anastina Blose, 70, a retired nurse's aide who now looks after her five orphaned grandchildren, said she wept as strikers invaded her ward in King George, where she had worked for more than two decades during apartheid and now, breathless and weak with TB, lies abed in her pink bathrobe. 'They want more money,' she said. 'We've got no money; we just want our health. It's not African, this behavior. If I'm your neighbor and you've got a loaf of bread, you give me a slice. But now everybody's just grabbing.' Public employees have gotten a series of annual pay increases that have led to a near doubling of government spending on wages in the past five years. This year, they are demanding an 8.6 percent increase, more than double the 3.7 percent rate of inflation. But the government has offered 7 percent. The workers also want a doubling of their monthly housing allowance to $137. No one here maintains that public workers are lavishly paid. Their salaries are modest by first world standards. The union says their members' earnings need to grow to reduce the country's gaping income inequality, which, by some estimates, is the worst in the world. But economists say that the rising public wage bill -- particularly with no agreement from unions that, for example, chronically absent teachers could be fired more easily -- is squeezing out spending on textbooks, hospitals and roads, with no assurances that the quality of public services will improve. In a nation where more than a third of the potential work force is jobless and over a million of its 50 million citizens have joined the ranks of the out-of-work since just last year, rising pay for public employees also reduces the government's room to hire more people, officials say. The strike seems motivated not just by wages, but also by resentment of the political elite. COSATU contends that senior politicians in the ANC are chasing what COSATU this week called 'a caviar lifestyle' while expecting workers to scrimp. The symbolism of ministers driving BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes at public expense has proved particularly toxic. 'Do they want ministers to ride on scooters when they do their work?' Richard Baloyi, minister of public services and administration, retorted in The Sunday Times. Baloyi, a figure in the government's effort to settle the strike, added, in comments confirmed by his spokesman, 'Even during apartheid time, ministers were using vehicles such as Mercs.' His remarks provoked outrage from workers. The strike is also a show of strength by a labor movement deeply disappointed in the limited power it wields in the governing alliance. COSATU played a critical role in the downfall of Thabo Mbeki, the previous president, and in the rise of President Jacob Zuma. It is frustrated that the government's economic approach -- a regulated free market with a focus on keeping inflation low and public debt under control -- has largely stayed the same. 'Once you're a minister, you forget where you came from,' said Bongani Xulu, 49, an office worker at King George V who was protesting outside the hospital this week. 'What happened to Mbeki will happen to them. If they don't do what we put them there to do, we'll take them down. We're kingmakers.' The hospital was a ghostly, fear-ridden place this week. Nurses still on the job avoided answering the phone, fearful their voices would be recognized by strikers. 'They can burn my house,' one nurse explained. A stone shattered the car window of another nurse Wednesday morning as she drove out of the parking lot after her graveyard shift. On the cavernous pediatric ward Wednesday, all but a handful of children had gone to stay with relatives. An 8-year-old boy wandered across the linoleum floor, the belt of his blue bathrobe dragging behind him, while a frail toddler in a high chair waved forlornly when visitors stepped onto the hushed ward. That same morning, Nakayiphi Ngwane, 48, a widow in a black cape, brought her 16-year-old daughter, Nokwethemba, a pretty wraith of a girl with TB, back to the hospital. Nokwethemba had left a week earlier after strikers burst onto her ward. Ngwane, destitute since her husband's death, had been forced to borrow money to come and pick up injections as the medicines dispensed to them by the hospital were running out. Once there, Ngwane, who has AIDS, told the nurse in charge that it might be better if her daughter were readmitted. 'She's coughing a lot,' Ngwane explained. 'I'm scared to get infected.' But the girl wanted to stay with her mother, and there are fears the strike may worsen. Early that afternoon, as strikers chanted, danced and sang across the street, Ngwane and Nokwethemba walked silently past them, their eyes straight ahead, bound for home. 