NHS pay: Labour and unions miss the boat
THE CYNICAL Tory announcement that this year it would pay the full 9.5 per cent average increase recommended by the 'independent' nurses' pay review body has been seen as a key indicator of an early election. But the NHS pay issue is further evidence also of the dire failure of the leadership of the workers' movement to exploit an issue where the Tories are most vulnerable.
The pay negotiations, covering a total of 1.2 million health workers, should have been at centre stage of the run-up to the expected June election. Yet instead of seizing the initiative and using the issue to highlight Tory cuts in health services, Labour leaders and the health unions allowed themselves to be outmanoeuvred by Thatcher's cabinet and the anti-union Royal College of Nursing
While the Tories unsuccessfully twisted arms behind the scenes to persuade the nurses' pay body to give only a small pay increase this year, the RCN was able to exploit the near-total silence from the health unions to grab the headlines with the easy and popular demand for an immediate £1,000 a year minimum rise for all nurses - a demand which it immediately abandoned as soon as the 9.5 per cent increase was
Belatedly trying to get in on the act, Labour leaders Hattersley and Meacher did not make the obvious and popular promise to pay up the extra £1,000 a year minimum; nor did they promise to restore normal pay bargaining for nurses; instead they offered the meaningless pledge that a new Labour government would pay the full review body award.
Thatcher's team, knowing that they had failed to sway the review body, and seeking easy popularity with 500,000 nurses, easily squashed this by cynically announcing that they, too, would accept the review body's recommendations - and then
Meacher, left stranded, did not even have the wit to point out that the Tories had left a E30 million gap (as much as €150,000 per health authority -threatening new cuts) between their 'generous' settlement and the money they are giving to health authorities to pay it with. He could not claim that a
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review body suggested; he was caught totally on the hop -while radio and TV interviewers scoured hospitals in vain looking for a nurse who would say she was satisfied with the
Meanwhile, what has happened to the health unions? Why did they allow the RCN to make the running, when it has been the RCN's appalling elitist and anti-union approach and constitutional 'no-strike' commitment that has done as much as anything to hold down
It is well known that hospitals in Britain's big cities have been suffering a growing shortage of key nursing staff as low pay has driven thousands of trained staff out of the NHS each year. With take-home pay for a staff nurse in London as low as £87 per week, a steadily increasing workload, and worsening conditions in an under-funded NHS, there is little to attract new entrants to the profession -and much to demoralise existing staff or lure them into the better-paid private sector.
The new pay settlement -arrived at without any trade union negotiations, and offering less than £10 per week extra to staff nurses - seems unlikely to be enough to stem the tide of nurses out of the NHS. But the unions still seem willing to sit idly on the sidelines.
The trade union attitude is summed up by NUPE leader Tom Sawyer, who recently argued that now is not the right time to wage a fight on public sector pay. As a result, not only are nurses (a majority of whom are in TUC-affiliated unions rather than the RON) left without any kind of lead from the labour movement, but chronically low-paid ancillary E staff are also being left high and dry by the unions.
Management have just rejected the joint unions ancillary pay claim, which called for 'a substantial flat rate increase in all basic rates of pay towards a target of a minimum. basic rate of £125 per week' Present ancillary pay levels range from a miserable £1.93 to a wretched £2.19 per hour -giving a weekly rate of £77.20 to £87.60 for the basic 40-hours. Management seem reluctant to go much beyond the 4-5 per cent mark in this year's pay review, leaving ancillary pay ever further below the poverty
The brutal process of competitive tendering for domestic, laundry and catering services has brought a drastic worked, with wages cut by an increase in part-time working and a massive loss of bonus payments. Though the vast
UPFRONT
majority of hospital contracts have gone 'in-house', this has been at the expense of worsening poverty and increasingly rapid turnover among a largely female
Instead of giving any lead in fighting for action by this 200,000-plus section of workers, health unions have focussed on pleas for the establishment of yet another new pay review body - 'an independent third party to judge what is fair' - if unions and management cannot agree!
Almost all of the so-called 'cost improvements' imposed by health authorities in the last five years have centred on cuts in staffing and in the wages of ancillary and other staff. A knock-on effect is more and more ancillary tasks being carried by hard-pressed nurses.
Pay levels are also now causing a major crisis of under-staffing among clerical and secretarial grades: yet the potential for a real, cross-union battle over pay, in which the systematic under-funding of the NHS could be exposed, has been squandered by the union leaders.
Meanwhile the half-hearted and cut-price pledges from Michael Meacher and Roy Hattersley appear so belatedly and grudgingly that few health workers can take them seriously. Instead of developing public concern over the plight of the health service as a major electoral weapon, Labour leaders are running from any commitment that might cost real money.
In a recent crisis meeting of Labour's NEC to review the Party's disastrous showing in the opinion polls, Dennis Skinner stunned everyone by suggesting the Party make some bold commitments on the NHS; to spend whatever was necessary to cure AIDS, and to spend as necessary to wipe out the 700,000-strong waiting list. Instead leaders of both Labour and the health unions have opted for a cautious line least likely to win votes or wage increases • HARRY SLOAN
Thatcherism looks more and more likely. JOHN LISTER and PHIL
HEARSE argue that the time has come for a strategic re-think for the hard left in the Labour Party and the unions — it is not enough to
DISMAY AND DEMORALISATION are running rampant through the labour movement even before the general election campaign begins. Disconsolate Labour activists comb miserably through glossy party handouts, looking for something to campaign on in the local elections; others hide from news broadcasts and papers, dreading the next embarrassing retreat or gaffe by Kinnock or his team.
The 'dream ticket' leadership installed by the union bureaucracy in the aftermath of Foot's 1983 debacle has turned into a living nightmare. Fond hopes and illusions that a re-elected Labour government might ride to the rescue of the working class and roll back the tide of Thatcherism have faded: in the crucial areas of the country for the next election the party and its leadership languish at 1983 levels of popularity and credibility. Kinnock himself — a cut-price Judas - has not even waited for the cock-crow of an election victory before rushing to renounce thrice over every 'radical' party policy.
The Tories, their press, and even the Alliance are left to make all the running: their every attack brings yet another embarrassed Kinnock retreat. Only recently: • We have seen him try to out-do Thatcher on gagging the Zircon film and upholding 'national security'; • We have witnessed his capitulation on cruise and his cringing pilgrimage to be humiliated by the popularly-reviled Ronald Reagan; • We have heard Kinnock's team attack the Tories for insufficiently chauvinist reprisals against Japanese capital; • The same gang of MPs have joined in the Tory onslaught on so-called loony left' councils; • Now they have opened fresh public attacks on black sections - even attempting to unseat Sharon Atkin as prospective candidate for the 'crime' of fighting for black people to vote Labour! The list is unending: the results disastrous. Four years of witch-hunts, whingeing and weaselling have produced a manifesto less radical, less convincing and less popular than the one which helped Michael Foot lead the party to a crushing defeat in 1983. Those including some misguided forces formerly on
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