THE allegedly ‘independent’ pay review bodies have recommended a below-inflation 1% pay ‘increase’ for public sector staff, but no increase at all for hundreds of thousands of NHS workers.
However, even the insulting 1% offer, a wage cut when inflation is taken into account, is too much for Health Secretary Hunt to accept. He rejects the recommended 1% ‘pay rise’ for hundreds of thousands of NHS staff whose contracts entitle them to increments as they become more skilful.
The cynical Hunt says that all this is for the good of the workers, since a 1% ‘rise’ for all workers would mean that tens of thousands of NHS workers would have to be sacked because of the unaffordable ‘pay rise’.
Unite said: ‘We will be consulting our health service members on possible industrial action, following Jeremy Hunt’s “divide and rule” refusal to sanction the recommended 1% pay rise for all NHS staff.’ Unite will be happy with 1% for all!
Public sector workers have had their pay frozen for two years and then suffered a 1% ‘pay rise’ for two years, in the midst of spiralling rent and food prices while gas and electricity has been hiked up by as much as 11% this year alone.
Inflation went up by 5% in 2010 and 2011, 3% in 2012 and 2.5% in 2013, meaning that, in real terms, public sector workers have had their pay severely slashed. Working families now find themselves forced to take out payday loans, incurring mountains of debt and facing eviction and bankruptcy.
The wage-freezing and wage-cutting must be smashed. Strike action must not be just for 1% for all but for at least 5% for all – which, in itself, is just a fraction of what workers have lost since 2010.
Meanwhile, more than 10,000 NHS bosses have enjoyed a 13% pay increase in the last four years, swelling the average senior NHS manager’s salary to £75,759, and hundreds of Trust Chief Executives are on over £260,000 a year, not including bonuses. As well, their numbers have mushroomed.
Simultaneously, 6,000 nursing posts have been axed since the Tory government took office, 3,994 of them senior nursing staff.
On Tuesday, Parliament passed the controversial clause 119 of the Care Bill which has awarded Health Secretary Hunt and his ‘special administrators’ sweeping powers to shut or downgrade any hospital they feel like with just 40 days notice!
Chief Executive of NHS England, David Nicholson, spelled out his vision for the future of the NHS yesterday, declaring that there will be no need for more than 40-70 major centres of A&E care in the entire country while the number of units providing specialised services like cardiac care and transplants would shrink from 3,000 to just 15-30. The UK is to be a health desert!
Worse is to come however. He is to be replaced by Simon Steve, the global executive of the american private health giant United Health, at the end of the month! War on the NHS has been declared in the most unprecedented way by this Tory coalition government who are hell bent on privatising the NHS, destroying it as a national health service free at the point of need – and what the Lewisham case highlights is that not a single gain of the working class can be defended through ‘legal channels’ as all law is class law.
These savage attacks on the NHS have provoked an eruption of anger from the working class, who will not allow the NHS which they fought for and won in 1948 to be taken away in 2014 and the entire class thrown back to the Victorian era when most people died before they got to 40.
However, anger is not enough. The strength of the entire working class must immediately be mobilised. There must be an all-out strike by the whole public sector against this pay freeze – not just for 1% for all, as the trade union leaders are demanding, but for at least 5%.
Smashing the pay freeze must be supported by all trade unions. The health unions and the TUC must organise a general strike against the pay freeze and wage-cutting to bring down the Tory coalition, and bring in a workers’ government.
This is the only way to claw back the wages that have been lost!