THE ROYAL College of Nursing (RCN) confirmed yesterday that nurses will go on strike for two days in the two weeks before Christmas on 15 and 20 December.
The announcement of this strike – the first in the RCN’s 106 year history – followed Tory ministers snubbing pleas by RCN leaders for formal talks with the government over NHS pay.
Tory health secretary Steve Barclay said yesterday that he was ‘open to talks’ but that there would be no more money for nurses or NHS staff, as he turned down the RCN’s offer of formal, detailed negotiations as the alternative to strike action.
The stark reality is that the Tories are not interested in negotiations over pay, they are determined to face down the RCN and nurses who have seen their pay slashed by 20% over 12 years of Tory austerity cuts and wage freezes.
This is the same message being driven home by the bosses at Royal Mail to postal workers who walked out for 48 hours on Thursday, with ten more strikes planned for next month in the run-up to Christmas, the busiest time of the year for the postal service.
Royal Mail boss, Simon Thompson, broke off meetings with the postal workers union, CWU, at the conciliation service Acas and delivered an ultimatum to the union.
A take-it-or-leave-it deal to turn the Royal Mail into a gig-economy-style parcel courier, using casual non-union labour accompanied by thousands of compulsory redundancies.
Under this deal the CWU branches would be removed from workplaces and denied negotiating rights on local matters.
The CWU would become, under this deal, into nothing more than an extension of the Royal Mail personnel department, responsible for implementing all the cuts to services and conditions imposed by the bosses.
Responding to the postal strike Royal Mail insisted that it had made its final and best offer.
CWU general secretary, Dave Ward, told Sky News: ‘Postal workers who only 18 months ago were being hailed as key workers for keeping the country connected during the pandemic are now facing the most brutal attack on jobs that we’ve seen in this country for decades.’
Ward pointed the finger at Royal Mail managers who are accusing postal workers of holding the country to ransom while it was them that were ‘destroying Royal Mail as we know it’.
Ward said: ‘The truth is that this company is axing thousands of jobs. At the same time, it’s replacing decent postal workers by refusing to lay off 11,000 agency workers and recruiting new self-employed drivers and new workers on almost 20 per cent less terms and conditions.’
He added: ‘The levels of harassment and intimidation and threats that are going on in workplaces every day would be unacceptable in any business.’
The refusal by the Tories and bosses to enter into negotiations with unions is the common thread of all these bitter struggles by workers to protect their wages from being slashed to poverty levels by raging inflation.
On the railways, the RMT’s general secretary, Mick Lynch, announced that eight days of rail strikes planned around Christmas would still go ahead.
This was despite him saying Tory transport secretary Mark Harper had ‘started a dialogue’ after the two met this week.
Lynch said: ‘If we call off the strikes, we’ll never get a settlement,’ adding: ‘My members won’t forgive me. I’ve given a commitment – until we get a tangible outcome, the action is on.’
With the Tory government and bosses prepared to sit out limited strikes to impose wage cuts, while they organise union busting, the only tangible outcome for workers is for the union leaders to take decisive action by calling a general strike to kick out the Tories.
This is a fight to the finish between the working class and a bankrupt capitalist system determined to make workers pay for their crisis.
Workers must demand the TUC call an immediate indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers, going forward to a socialist planned economy.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists fight for this revolutionary policy and perspective – join today, there is no time to lose.
