HEALTH workers are steaming wild at the arrogant refusal by management and Labour ministers to make any national pay offer for working through the millennium festivities.
UNISON and the other health unions had tabled a claim for a flat rate £500 to be paid by all staff working over the night of the hyped-up holiday - modest in Coll palison with some of the deals being squeezed out of management in private industry and the utilities.
After a prolonged constipated silence. the NHS Executive responded by insisting that there should be no national-level deal, leaving unions to negotiate piecemeal with management in cach local Trust.
INT members on April 10 Low Pay demo This was enough to convince UNISON's health conference to ignore the platform's call for moderation and vote 3-1 for a ballot on strike action over the two days of the millennium weekend. Since then, it has all gone very quiet at UNISON Head Office: but 'NHS management have sensed that union officials are a soft touch by putting the boot in. One major Trust, the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals, has just announced that it will pay no more than basic Bank Holiday enhancements for staff who turn up to work while all their friends and relatives are welcoming in the next century. Personnel boss Mike Fleming, apparently oblivious to massive vacancy rates and staff turnover, insisted that the Trust would depend on the "public service" ethos of health workers.
One London Trust has offered different patronsing approach, trying to fob staff off with a hand-out of tickets to the Millennium Dome instead of a decent pay packet.
The NHS London Region is seeking to take some of the heat out of staff anger by offering doctors and nurses a £150 bonus for the Millennium Eve: even this would cost £7m across the capital, and raise financial problems for cash-strapped Trusts.
As the NHS heads for a nervous winter, the one certain factor is that while the sky is apparently the limit for pay rises in the boardroom and private industry, anything more than a pat on the head is apparently too much for the staff who keep front-line public services running.