Welcome to NHS worker's blog - demanding a decent pay rise

NHS unions are consulting their members now on a new pay offer from the Government. Frankly, the offer is an insult to everyone who works in the NHS. They're trying to divide and conquer by offering different deals for health workers in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and they want to confuse us all by offering some things 'staged' so that we only get the money half way through the year.

The unions kicked off the year demanding a pay rise above the rate of inflation, which is currently standing at just under 5%. At UNISON's health conference in April, there was a proposal from some branches to put a specific figure on the demand of 5% or a flat-rate increase of £1000 a year for the lowest paid NHS workers. Mike Jackson, UNISON's Senior National Organiser and the lead negotiator for the union in the NHS pay talks, spoke against this on behalf of the union's leadership, arguing that with inflation rising all the time he wanted to be able to fight for more than 5%. It's a shame, then, that the "new" deal on offer from the Government, which Mike Jackson encouraged the UNISON Health Service Group Executive to consult members on rather than rejecting it and starting an industrial action ballot, is not even worth the 2.5% pay rise that the Pay Review Body said NHS workers should get back in April.

The new offer is still a staged pay rise, with NO CHANGE at all proposed to the pay rise backdated to April 2007. The only change is that the second stage of the pay rise, due in November, will now increase pay scales either by a further 1.5% or so that the total increase reaches £400, whichever is the greater. So workers on Agenda for Change bands 1 or 2 will get a slightly bigger rise (but no-one will get a rise big enough to cope with the increasing prices represented by the inflation rate of 4.8%).

There are a few other sweeteners to the offer - staff who have to register with professional bodies will get a few quid towards their registration fee (less tax, of course), while those who do not need professional registration will see their employer get a £25 per head training allowance FOR THIS YEAR ONLY which is supposed to make up for all the cuts in training that NHS Trusts carried out last year. Yeah, right!

In short, the deal is utterly inadequate, and no-one should think that this is acceptable. That the union leaders have given up on all their fighting talk from the start of the year is no reason for healthworkers to do the same. Members of UNISON should reject the paltry offer from the Government, and force their leadership to re-instate the industrial action ballot.

The negotiators have proved that the government won't give us anything without a fight. So it's time we gave them a fight! NHS workers have put up with too much for far too long. If we don't want to tie ourselves to three years of pay cuts in the National Health Service we have to fight now.

This blog will be a source of information and campaigning ideas for all NHS workers who want their unions to reject the below inflation pay offer and fight for what we really need - an above-inflation pay rise for everyone who works in the NHS, together with a reduction in the working week and the abolition of the lowest pay band. We can do it. The Irish nurses' strike, the health workers' recent victory in New Zealand and the ongoing battles by healthworkers all over the world against cuts and privatisation show that the pessimists are completely wrong. Healthworkers can fight, we can stand up for ourselves, and we can win. All that is stopping us is the defeatism of our own leaders, and our lack of organisation at a rank and file level.

Hopefully this blog can help with that!

NHS worker