UNISON yesterday told its members that the barely improved health employers offer which has been approved by the Brown government is ‘the best that can be achieved’.
The offer remains 2.5 per cent, in two stages for health workers in England, along with a few minor fringe benefits for a minority of workers.
With inflation running at 4.8 per cent the offer remains a wage cut.
The UNISON statement said: ‘The new package gives extra help to the low paid and, for staff in England where the pay offer remains staged, additional money targeted at training plus a £38 contribution towards professional fees.’
Health workers will treat this offer as an insult and will have no time for the Brown government that is behind it, or the Unison leaders that are trying to sell it to an already angry membership.
Mike Jackson, UNISON lead negotiator, trying to think of something good to say about the offer, remarked: ‘The package on offer is a complex one and will mean different things to different NHS staff depending on where they live.’ In other words it is divisive, giving some sections a tiny amount of cash, in a feeble attempt to win their vote for what remains a wage cut.
Jackson added: ‘It is the best offer we are likely to achieve through negotiations and we will be balloting our members over whether they wish to accept it.’
Quite – this is the most that you will get while the Unison leaders are on their knees.
The only way to win a real wage rise is to form a public sector alliance and for the whole sector to come out fighting to smash the wage freeze, end the jobs massacre and bring down the Brown government to go forward to a workers government that will carry out socialist policies.
An individual postal ballot of all NHS Unison members will be held between 20th August and the 13th September 2007 on whether to accept the offer.
News Line urges UNISON members to reply to Brown’s insulting offer by chucking it out and by telling the UNISON leaders that since they are not prepared to fight they should get out as well.
With worldwide inflation rising, the Brown government is saying quite plainly that there can be no rises in the public sector bigger that 2.0 per cent.
His message is clear. It is the working class that is going to have to pay for the crisis of capitalism.
Nowhere is this truer than in the NHS, where the government is pushing to shut down some 100 District General Hospitals in order to boost care in the community and sack thousands of health workers, doctors, nurses and ancillary workers.
The latest shock in this war was announced yesterday when it was confirmed by the NHS trade unions that they will fight plans by Scarborough and North East Yorkshire NHS Trust to slash over 1,000 jobs at Scarborough Hospital over the next two years, amounting to 40 per cent of the workforce.
This is going to be the fate of District General Hospitals all over the UK.
The only answer to this closure programme is for the local trade unions to form Councils of Action to occupy hospitals threatened with closure and to agitate and organise for national strike action in defence of the NHS.
Without occupations by the trade unions and the communities there can be no real defence of the District General Hospitals.
This programme for occupations must be allied to the struggle for national strike action.
What is needed is the organisation of a general strike to bring down the Brown government.
The trade unions must bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and the major drug companies.
Defence of the NHS and the Welfare State requires a struggle to abolish capitalism with a socialist revolution.
Today the bosses have made it clear that modern capitalism cannot tolerate a Welfare State.
The reverse is even truer. The working class and youth can no longer tolerate capitalism.
It has to go and be replaced by world socialism.
