A blog to build a campaign for decent pay in the NHS.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Truth, lies and NHS pay offers

UNISON West Midlands has a statement on its website about the new NHS pay offer.

It says, "The offer includes a lump sum payment for the lowest paid NHS staff, training budgets for non- clinical staff, recognition payments amounting to the recent increase in NMC registration fees for those NHS staff required to register, agreement to enter in to talks on improvements to the Agenda for Change pay structure and terms and conditions."

Which, of course, is not true. There is no "lump sum payment for the lowest paid". There is a flat-rate element to the offer which means lower paid NHS staff will get a marginal greater increase to their pay scale. Not only is there no lump sum but the increase to the pay scale is being brought in only with the second stage of the staged pay offer - which means low paid NHS members won't see a penny of it until November!

As if over-selling the pay offer isn't bad enough, the article goes on to provide a link to a description of the pay offer on the website of NHS employers - who, naturally, think that union members should all accept the offer. In the interests of balance they should probably provide a link here too, so that members in the West Midlands can hear something from those healthworkers who think that we should reject the pay offer. Don't hold your breath, though...

Several UNISON members have been commenting that the official union statements seem to be making the offer sound better than it really is. The agreed position of the UNISON Health SGE, remember, was to make no recommendation for or against the offer, but simply to say it was the best deal that could be achieved by negotiations.

Yet the statements produced so far have repeatedly described the offer as "improved" without mentioning how far it is from the claim we submitted back in March. And it's actually arguable whether the offer really is improved. It is certainly "changed", but for many NHS staff above band 4 the only things it offers are a £25 training allowance paid to their employers and talks about talks on the non-pay elements of the 2007 claim. That's not much in the way of an improvement.

Even for those who stand to gain the most from the revisions to the pay offer - those in pay band 1 and 2 - the new offer is not even worth 2.5%. That means that we'd all have been better off winning the scrapping of the staging rather than cooking up such a complex pay offer but leaving the staging in place.

4 comments:

Stephen Lintott said...

They have to sell it hard, otherwise they have no choice but to accept it is crap. I still struggle to understand how a trade union leadership can be scared to organise an industrial action campaign. They have only recently supported strike action
when forced to by members, local government and various care workers campaigns being the obvious examples. No one feels this is a good deal, not even the national leadership to quote them "The health executive believes it is the best that can be achieved through negotiation." which might be true but they are extremely unsupportive of an industrial action campaign "Should members reject the new deal, they should also be prepared to support industrial action, the executive said." I think this is something we agree with them on, members will need to support an industrial action campaign to win a fair pay offer. We need to spell this out to members, including what we mean by industrial action. It is the clearest and most honest way to work for the members to reject the new offer with the literature that will be coming from head office

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