By Jeremy Dewar
The timing was perfect. Just as Chancellor Rachel Reeves was boasting to Labour conference that she had ‘delivered a meaningful, real pay rise to millions of public sector workers’, 145,000 nurses told her their offer was no such thing.
The Royal College of Nursing announced the result of their consultative ballot on 24 September: a 64% No vote on the highest turnout in the union’s history.
In terms of money in the pocket, the 5.5% pay offer did not represent a real pay rise over the three years since inflation started to eat into workers’ household budgets. The figures confirm this.
During the 2022-23 strike wave, inflation reached 11.1 and was above 5.5% for 21 consecutive months. To ‘compensate’ for this massive hike in prices, nurses were awarded a non-consolidated bonus of between £1,400 and £2,400 for the first year and 5% for the second.
Despite the union’s leadership recommending acceptance of the deal as the ‘best offer on the table’, RCN members roundly rejected it. Sadly the rank and file activists around NHS Workers Say NO and other local initiatives were unable to convert this rejection into a successful strike vote, due to the undemocratic thresholds set by the Tory anti-union laws.
Next steps
Nurses can feel rightly proud to have rejected this terrible deal, but it does not mean their work is done. The RCN has so far not indicated that there will follow a strike ballot. A similar refusal to accept the cuts in the 2023 deal failed to reignite the strikes, when RCN then-general secretary Pat Cullen made it clear that she had no intention of calling militant action.
Indeed new general secretary Prof. Nicola Ranger spent last week glad-handing Wes Streeting, assuring him that, ‘many [nurses] will support the new government’s health and care agenda… The government will find our continued support for the reforms key to their success.’
This is demonstrably untrue. Unite nurses at Guy’s and St Thomas’ have struck against imposed late shift working, while Unison healthcare assistants in several hospital trusts have walked out demanding higher grading and better pay for the fact that they habitually carry out nursing duties.
If nurses really support Streeting’s demand they work unsocial hours and accept creeping privatisation, why have 40,000 of them left the profession in the past year?
All NHS workers need to up the ante now. Link up the strikes across the different unions with joint workplace meetings and strike committees. Demand an immediate ballot in the RCN. All strikes need to be placed under the control of those who are taking the action and have to work under NHS pay and conditions.
This means an urgent need for rank and file organisation. Join or set up NHS Workers Say NO committees in every hospital and healthcare centre. And come to the Troublemakers conference in Manchester on 5 October, where there will be opportunities to discuss the next steps to save the NHS.
