Nurses in Britain walk out over payment amid strained medical services

Healthcare workers protest in central London, Britain, on Feb. 6, 2023. Nurses and ambulance workers in Britain on Monday started another round of strikes in the thick of lengthy and intensifying disputes over payment. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

LONDON, Feb. 6 (Xinhua) -- Nurses and ambulance workers in Britain on Monday started another round of strikes in the thick of lengthy and intensifying disputes over payment.

Health workers won support amid a raging cost-of-living crisis, and the industrial action was feared to put more pressure on the medical system.

BIGGEST DAY

Nursing staff were set to strike again in England on Monday and Tuesday. The two-day walkouts will be at the highest intensity in the union's history, taking place at 73 National Health Service (NHS) trusts in England, compared to 44 in December and 55 in January, according to the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

Members of other health unions were also on strike, making Monday the single biggest day of strike action in the 75-year history of the NHS, the RCN added, noting that the Welsh government made an offer to NHS staff of an additional 3 percent pay rise and the planned strike action in Wales for this week was canceled.

"Your government looks increasingly isolated in refusing to reopen discussions about the 2022-23 NHS pay award. As a result, the strike action for England remains -- with tens of thousands of nurses losing wages to ensure you hear their voice," said RCN General Secretary Pat Cullen. "It must not be in vain."

Also on Monday, ambulance workers represented by trade unions Unite, Unison and the GMB in trusts across England, Northern Ireland and Wales took strike action.

"This dispute will only be resolved when it enters into proper negotiations about the current pay dispute," said Unite national lead officer Onay Kasab. "The government's constant attempts to kick the can down the road and its talk about one off payments, or slightly increased pay awards in the future, is simply not sufficient to resolve this dispute."

In response, the British government has said the pay rises are unaffordable and that higher pay will not help fight raging inflation. Minister for Mental Health and Women's Health Strategy Maria Caulfield on Monday called on the RCN to suspend strikes in England to allow for pay negotiations.

The government has a responsibility to all taxpayers and every one percent increase is about 700 million pounds (842 million U.S. dollars) that the government has to find, Caulfield told Sky News.

PAY DISPUTES

Since the beginning of its action, the RCN has asked for a pay rise above inflation. The value of salaries for experienced nurses is 20 percent lower in real terms since 2010, due to successive below-inflation pay awards, said the union in December.

Back in November, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay tweeted that the government has accepted the recommendations of the NHS Pay Review Body to give nurses a pay rise of at least 1,400 pounds (1,685 dollars), and this means a newly qualified nurse will typically earn over 31,000 pounds (37,302 dollars) a year.

While the RCN was demanding a pay rise of 17.6 percent, it was "an increase around three times the average settlement that millions of hardworking people outside the public sector are getting," Barclay added.

Britain has been in the grip of consistently high inflation because of both global and domestic factors. Its consumer price index rose at an annual rate of 10.5 percent in December, and the cost-of-living crisis facing households continued as food inflation remained historically high, official figures showed.

Meanwhile, wages have failed to keep up for a long time. "The lack of growth in average real-terms earnings since the financial crisis is clear," noted a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies in October. Average public sector earnings in July 2022 were 4 percent lower in real terms than in July 2007, it showed.

"The very large number of strikes, very much concentrated in the public sector or previously public sector occupations, is really the result of an unprecedentedly long period of downward pressure on pay," Deborah Dean, co-director of the Industrial Relations Research Unit at the Warwick Business School, has told Xinhua.

Dean said health services were under great strain. "You can't go on, particularly after the acute pressures of the pandemic, where extraordinary demands were made on NHS staff, and in particular frontline staff nurses and doctors, and people have left through ill health, through the pressures," she noted.

"UNPRECEDENTED PRESSURES"

Back in July 2022, a Health and Social Care Committee report said the NHS and social care sectors "are facing the greatest workforce crisis in their history." An official briefing showed the total number of NHS vacancies in June 2022 was 132,139, a vacancy rate of 9.7 percent, which was an increase from the previous year, when the number of vacancies was 98,827 and the rate was 7.6 percent.

"Pay and employment have reduced. Funding has reduced. And this has meant people are both effectively being paid less and also their work is intensified because there are fewer people doing the necessary jobs," Dean said, noting that it in particular is one of the reasons why nurses went on strike.

Patients were suffering. Poor health and unprecedented NHS waiting lists are forcing people out of work, the RCN noted earlier this month. Data shows 6.9 million were waiting for NHS treatment in England as of November 2022, almost one million more than the previous year, it added.

"People are having to wait longer to access services when demand has never been greater," RCN Director for England Patricia Marquis said. "Patients are not dying because nurses are striking. Nurses are striking because patients are dying."

But analysis showed that the ongoing strikes also put more strains on the medical system. NHS England data showed that more than 5,000 operations and 30,000 outpatient appointments had needed to be rescheduled across strike days, according to the NHS Confederation in January.

Commenting on the Monday strikes, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: "This escalation takes us deeper into the situation NHS leaders have been warning against -- a war of attrition between the government and unions spanning several months at a time when NHS services are seeing unprecedented pressures."

"We're increasingly concerned about the cumulative impact of strike days and record demand -- the longer this vicious cycle continues the longer it will take for the NHS to tackle the elective backlog," Taylor said.

Healthcare workers protest in central London, Britain, on Feb. 6, 2023. Nurses and ambulance workers in Britain on Monday started another round of strikes in the thick of lengthy and intensifying disputes over payment. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Healthcare workers protest in central London, Britain, on Feb. 6, 2023. Nurses and ambulance workers in Britain on Monday started another round of strikes in the thick of lengthy and intensifying disputes over payment. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

A healthcare worker protests in central London, Britain, on Feb. 6, 2023. Nurses and ambulance workers in Britain on Monday started another round of strikes in the thick of lengthy and intensifying disputes over payment. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Healthcare workers protest in central London, Britain, on Feb. 6, 2023. Nurses and ambulance workers in Britain on Monday started another round of strikes in the thick of lengthy and intensifying disputes over payment. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Healthcare workers protest in central London, Britain, on Feb. 6, 2023. Nurses and ambulance workers in Britain on Monday started another round of strikes in the thick of lengthy and intensifying disputes over payment. (Xinhua/Li Ying)