If the government was deliberately trying to encourage union militancy, it could not be making a better job of it. It is reported that junior doctors – or ‘resident doctors’ as we are now supposed to call them for fear of implying that they might be less qualified than consultants who have been doing their jobs for 40 years – could be in line for a pay rise of five per cent this year. This would be on top of the 22 per cent they were awarded last year. Meanwhile, nurses, who had a pay rise of 5.5 per cent last year, appear to be on course for a rise of no more than 2.8 per cent. Inflation, to put these figures into context, is currently running at 2.6 per cent.
Can the government risk continuing to award much greater pay rises to junior doctors than to nurses?
What have junior doctors done, and nurses not done, to deserve such a generous rise? They went on a prolonged strike, that’s what. While nurses settled early in their negotiations, junior doctors plugged on and on until last year’s general election. Soon after, Health Secretary Wes Streeting bought them off by stuffing their mouths with gold, to borrow Nye Bevan’s expression. They called over 20 days of all-out strikes, several of them lasting multiple days, requiring consultants to provide emergency care.
They have been rewarded handsomely for their militancy. The lesson here for nursing unions, and all other public sector unions, is obvious: so long as Labour are in government, strike action will pay. Whatever you lose in lost pay on strike days, you will almost certainly make up for in pay rises.
This message is unlikely to have been lost on the Royal College of Nursing (a trade union rather than a learned body, whatever its pretentious name), which has already this week threatened strike action. Small wonder that the NHS is bleating yet again about cuts, in spite of an extra £22 billion of extra funding. With Labour in charge, extra money for the NHS will always be swallowed up in pay awards rather than better services.
But there is another point to be made here: could the government be opening itself potentially to the kind of legal action which fuelled Birmingham City Council, contributing heavily to its bankruptcy? There, an employment tribunal ruled that cleaners undertook ‘work of equal value’ to dustmen, yet were paid less. Given that cleaners were female-dominated and dustmen male-dominated, this effectively constituted sex discrimination, and cleaners were awarded large, backdated pay rises.
The General Medical Council announced that for the first time last year that there were more female than male qualified doctors in the UK. However, this is skewed by a large number of female GPs. Hospital doctors remain male-dominated. Nurses, on the other hand, are very much female -dominated, with 89 per cent female.
Can the government risk continuing to award much greater pay rises to junior doctors than to nurses? Needless to say, it has done nothing to do away with the concept of ‘work of equal value’ in sex discrimination law. By favouring junior doctors, it has made itself liable for trouble in the courts as well as encouraged union militancy.
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