HEALTHCARE unions strike the right note of militancy in demanding pay increases that make up for years of real-terms cuts.
As lockdown eases ministers are pushing for a return to “normal” — hoping that the public will rapidly forget the fulsome tributes they paid to key workers in the spring and the weekly claps for the NHS.
“Normal” does not just mean a resumption of economic activity.
It means a return to business as usual in politics too — with the government dropping its brief co-operation with trade unions, whose voice in shaping measures like the job retention scheme was crucial.
This is why unions have been shut out of post-Brexit trade talks after refusing to sign non-disclosure agreements — which would effectively prevent them from raising the alarm over proposals that negatively affect workers’ rights or open up public services to further privatisation.
Lockdown delivered a stark lesson in whose work keeps our society functioning — from cleaners and refuse workers through postal and delivery workers to shop workers and many more.
It was striking how many of those who had to continue going to work throughout lockdown and were unable to work from home were among the worst-paid workers in the country.
The popularisation of the term “key worker” reflected a new recognition of their value and a growing determination that they should get a better deal — the sentiment expressed by Labour leader Keir Starmer in his victory speech in April, when he insisted that key workers “were last and now they should be first.”
Few sectors are more obviously crying out for a better deal than healthcare. In the NHS years of squeezed budgets have meant real-terms pay cuts and severe staffing shortages.
These had created a “permanent winter crisis” that afflicted the health service long before it was faced with the pandemic.
A pay rise that makes up for years of shrinking incomes is the right of every NHS worker given the sacrifices made over the last six months.
That is doubly the case when Covid-19 is not a thing of the past — the additional pressures and risks will be borne by health workers for the foreseeable future.
Against this, the government will claim that pay rises are unaffordable and use the growth in debt caused by the increase in public spending that funded furlough and other schemes to argue that the public purse cannot stand the strain.
With a jobs massacre under way in the private sector, leading to increased competition for work and downward pressure on wages, public-sector workers will be told they have it easy.
Ministers and employers are past masters at turning workers in the public and private sectors against each other, seeking to use resentment at allegedly better terms, pay or pensions to attack conditions across the board. Mass unemployment will only strengthen their hand.
The labour movement and left must give no ground at all to attempts to sow division. As a TUC slogan of recent years had it, Britain needs a pay rise — unions need to co-ordinate a battle for higher pay across the workforce and combine industrial action with public campaigning to resist employers that try to force staff to take pay cuts in order to keep their jobs, as is already happening at companies like British Airways and British Gas.
The TUC’s new deal for workers campaign can be an effective vehicle to address the long-term deterioration in pay and conditions, using the pandemic to make the political case for a new settlement.
The strong pay demands of health workers should receive backing across the movement and be matched by ambitious pay targets in other sectors.
Labour should be urged to offer full public support to this agenda and challenged to demonstrate that commitment on picket lines as well as in Parliament.
