Over August-September the health unions will be organising consultative ballots on the 3% pay offer for health workers.
Unison’s email to members says that the 3% rise doesn’t increase pay to anyone unless Band 8C or above; that it increases the pay gap between highest and lowest paid workers in the NHS; and that it “does not embed the real Living Wage as a minimum”.
Therefore, says Unison, it cannot recommend that members accept the offer. The union leadership, however, falls short of a positive campaign to reject and go for industrial action. Unison’s consultation closes on 10 Sept.
The other health unions are also conducting consultative ballots. The RCN consultation starts on 12 August and ends on 13 September; GMB opened 6 August and ends on 17 September; Unite opens 27 August, closes 24 September.
All the unions have demanded a higher pay rise. However, workplace campaigning and national union action from national union leaderships has been minimal, mostly limited to
emails and on-line meetings.
Rank-and-file groups Nurses United and Nurses Say No have organised workplace leafleting and protests which helped push the union leaderships to demand higher, but the success of the campaigning is limited by the inertia of the official union machines and the failure of the Labour Party to raise any demands around NHS pay, funding, or NHS reorganisation.
In workplaces there is additional difficulty when organising around pay in that the main pressure people are facing is their workload, understaffing and waiting lists. For instance, in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services and adult mental health, positions remain unfilled. In my workplace instructions are coming more often from the adolescent inpatient ward that they have no more capacity and we must limit admissions.
Staff are also aware that, unlike previously, when the Treasury funded NHS pay increases, this time a large proportion of the increase is due to be met by NHS England from existing budgets. In my workplace, workers will say that they would prefer any extra money to go to employing more people rather than to pay rises, because the waiting lists are so long and people’s lives could be in danger.
We need to convince people that the future of NHS services and staffing will be best served by a vigorously fought dispute over pay. The union leaderships could make a big difference to this and to the outcome of the upcoming ballots.
The newly elected left National Executive of Unison could certainly make a difference. Uniting struggles If Unison were to announce a campaign of protest and industrial action on pay in the public sector, linked to a fight for good NHS funding and against the Tories’ new NHS reorganisation, then they could begin to unite struggles of health workers, local government workers, and the wider labour movement, on both pay and services.
The unions should be discussing industrial tactics that could win, including disaggregated ballots and cross union action.
Activists will push motions with those ideas through branches and regions, leaflet workplaces calling for rejection of the 3%, and continue to organise local actions which link the issues of pay, staffing and service provision.
