ON the day that NHS workers took strike action for the first time in 30 years, and in the case of midwives the first time in their 133 year history, the Tory health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, delivered a contemptuous reply to these workers’ call for a pay rise.
He dismissed a pay rise for low paid NHS workers with the claim that if they were awarded even the pitiful 1% increase recommended by the pay review body this would force the government to cut 14,000 nurses jobs.
He went on to claim that he did not want to ‘turn the clock back to further care episodes such as Mid-Staffordshire’.
He blames the NHS crisis on nurses, porters, and ancillary staff being over-paid.
The cuts they have endured for the past five years of this government through pay freezes and below inflation level increases, which have resulted in many experiencing a 20% cut in take home pay, is still not enough for the Tories.
It was not the pay of nurses or doctors that led to the Mid-Staffs scandal, it was the cuts inflicted by a management desperate to prepare the hospital for foundation trust status.
It is not midwives or nurses who threaten the health of patients, it is all the government cuts inflicted on the NHS through an unrelenting drive to close down wards, maternity units and entire hospitals in order to save money to pay off the national debt.
As far as the Tories are concerned, pay cuts and poverty level pay rates are to be a permanent feature of British capitalism.
The drop in government revenue from income tax reported this week was entirely due to the fact that millions of workers today earn so little that they don’t pay any income tax at all – forcing the government to borrow an extra £3 billion to cover the short-fall.
This extra £3 billion will have to be paid for by even more pay cuts for the working class on top of the £10 billion the coalition are intent in ‘saving’ this year to bring down the national debt.
Given that £10 billion is a drop in the ocean compared to the massive total national debt of £1.4 trillion, it is clear that the pay cuts and poverty level wages being inflicted on workers today will be nothing compared to the cuts the capitalist class is determined to inflict in order to pay off the debt run up to save the banks from collapsing.
Capitalism today cannot afford to pay a living wage, it can only hope to survive by driving the working class into the ground and creating a permanent slave wage economy, policed by the courts and police enforcing anti-strike laws.
In response to this declaration of war, the trade union leadership have completely caved in.
While the NHS workers showed on Monday that the working class is prepared and eager to fight this government, the leadership are running a mile.
Instead of an all-out, united fight, these leaders are working might and main to limit any action to one day stoppages and protest marches like next Saturday’s TUC march called on the slogan of ‘Britain needs a Pay Rise’.
Workers don’t need telling they need a pay rise, what they are demanding is action to get one.
A real fight against low pay means a war against a government intent on making the working class pay for the crisis of the capitalist system through permanent austerity and pay cuts.
It means organising a general strike to kick out the government and advance to a workers government that will replace a capitalist system that cannot afford to pay decent wages with a socialist system where production is for human need, not for the profit of the capitalist class.
The existing leadership of the unions are refusing to lead this fight – they must be removed and replaced with a new, revolutionary leadership that is prepared to wage this war.
