Skip to main content

Star Comment: Divorced from reality

ENERGY Secretary Ed Davey showed yesterday that Liberal Democrats are just as indifferent to workers’ living standards as his Tory collaborators.

His claim to have “pulled our economy from the abyss” illustrates clearly that workers are not represented in “our economy” because huge swathes of them remain mired in the abyss.

City fatcats’ salaries and bonuses soar into the stratosphere and the price tags attached to their expensive properties do likewise, but people who keep our health services going are suffering.

What kind of economic recovery does another year of pay restraint for this essential workforce reveal?

These mainly low-paid workers contribute the equivalent of £1.5 billion to the government each year in unpaid overtime.

Despite this, skinflint Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt refuses to pay them a 1 per cent rise on top of their contractual incremental pay increase, which could be met at a cost of less than half their voluntary overtime contribution.

Hunt is treating the incremental increases paid to staff not yet receiving the full rate for the job as a pay rise and is reserving the 1 per cent payment for those at the top of their pay grade.

But even this 1 per cent is unconsolidated, meaning that it is calculated on basic salary and can have no effect on overtime rates, unsociable hours allowance or pensions.

On the other hand, health workers in Wales are hopeful that Labour Health Minister Mark Drakeford will choose to implement the 1 per cent in full to all staff without exception.

While NHS workers’ pay has been frozen or capped every year that the conservative coalition has been in office, causing working class families to be £1,600 a year worse off, there has been no freeze on fares, food, housing, energy and other prices.

In reality, the government is implicated in this attack on living standards.

It forced up prices by raising VAT from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent. It is pushing up rail fares by insisting that passengers should pay a greater share of rail company profits.

And it sits idly by while the profits “earned” per consumer by the energy companies have doubled in recent years.

At the same time, government housing policy — not least its refusal to finance a massive council housebuilding programme to tackle homelessness — drives up rent levels.

Opinion polls regularly document the debt of gratitude that the public feels towards NHS staff, but these essential workers cannot live on a warm glow. They need better wages now.

That will have been made clear yesterday by the protests outside the Department of Health in Whitehall and the NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool’s Kings Dock, the lunchtime rallies, public meetings, campaign stalls and lobbying sessions with MPs.

Politicians and the public should be left in no doubt of the anger and frustration felt by NHS staff.

Striking does not come easily to people who choose to work in our health service, but if they feel that there is no alternative way to nudge government into accepting their case for justice, everyone should back them.

Unison general secretary Dave Prentis’s warning that the workers’ message — “We have had enough of austerity” — is directed at all politicians should be taken seriously.

Parliamentary consensus behind the bankers’ austerity programme is a betrayal of workers’ interests. Let those who caused the capitalist crisis pay for it.

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 13,288
We need:£ 4,712
3 Days remaining
Donate today